Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass (born June 16, 1947) is an American poet and author. She has won three Pushcart Prizes and a Lambda Literary Award for her 2002 book Mules of Love. She co-authored the 1991 book The Courage to Heal about recovery from child sexual abuse. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 and was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017. Bass taught poetry at Pacific University and has founded poetry programs for people in prison.

Early life and education Bass grew up in Pleasantville, New Jersey, where her parents owned a liquor store. She attended Goucher College, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1968 with a bachelor's degree. She pursued a master's degree in creative writing at Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton, and graduated in 1970.

Career From 1970 to 1974, Bass worked at Project Place, a social service center in Boston.

She co-wrote the best-selling The Courage to Heal with Laura Davis about healing from childhood sexual abuse, as well as developing training seminars for professionals, offering workshops for survivors, The book has been widely criticized; neither Bass nor Davis has any formal training in psychotherapy or psychiatry, and critics argue that the book's scientifically unsound therapeutic advice exacerbated the moral panic over satanic ritual abuse. She is a co-founder of the Survivors Healing Center in Santa Cruz, California, a non-profit organization offering services to survivors of child sexual abuse.

Bass teaches at the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific University in Oregon. She has taught workshops in Santa Cruz, California since she moved there in 1974 as well as nationally. In 2013, she founded the Poetry Program at the Salinas Valley State Prison, which offers a weekly workshop to incarcerated men. In 2014, she also founded the Santa Cruz Poetry Project, which offers weekly workshops to people incarcerated in Santa Cruz County jails.

Bass has written poetry books including Indigo (2020), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, a Publishing Triangle Award, and a Northern California Book Award; Like a Beggar (2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, a Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and a Northern California Book Award; The Human Line (2007); and Mules of Love (2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.

Her nonfiction books include I Never Told Anyone (co-edited with Louise Thornton, HarperCollins, 1983); Free Your Mind (written with Kate Kaufman, HarperCollins, 1996); and The Courage to Heal (HarperCollins, 1988). They have been translated into twelve languages.

Bass lives in Santa Cruz with her wife, Janet Bryer.

Awards Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, the Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Literary Journal Prize for Poetry, and four Pushcart Prizes (2003, 2015, 2017). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council. Mules of Love (2002) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Published works

Poetry

Of Separateness and Merging. Autumn Press. 1977. . For Earthly Survival. Moving Parts Press. 1980. Our Stunning Harvest. New Society Publishers. 1984. .

Indigo. Copper Canyon Press. 2020. .

Nonfiction

Children's books