Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass (born June 16, 1947) is an American poet and author. She has published several poetry books, including Mules of Love (2002), Indigo (2020), Like a Beggar (2014), and The Human Line (2007). Mules of Love won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry in 2002, and she has earned three Pushcart Prizes (2003, 2014, 2017). In 2014 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and in 2017 she was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, serving until 2022.
Bass co-authored The Courage to Heal, a widely known book about recovering from childhood sexual abuse, and has written nonfiction such as I Never Told Anyone. She has taught poetry at Pacific University and created poetry programs for people in prison, including the Salinas Valley State Prison program (2013) and the Santa Cruz County Jail program (2014). She is a co-founder of the Survivors Healing Center in Santa Cruz.
Bass was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Pleasantville, New Jersey; later her family moved to Ventnor City, New Jersey. She attended Atlantic City High School, earned a BA magna cum laude from Goucher College in 1968, and received an MA in creative writing from Boston University in 1970, studying with Anne Sexton. She now lives in Santa Cruz, California with her wife, Janet Bryer, and their two children, Saraswati Bryer-Bass and Max Bryer-Bass. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker and other major journals.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:48 (CET).