Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and educator whose poems center on relationships, conflict, the body, sexuality, and food. She has called herself a praise poet in that she uses poetry to find joy and affirm life no matter what the situation is. Bass's poems depict a variety of contexts, including difficult ones such as sorrow, loss, and regret, but she returns constantly to beauty and humor in her work. Bass earned an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with the renowned poet Anne Sexton. Apart from poetry, Bass has also written several important nonfiction books, including guides for those who were sexually abused as children as well as LGBT youth and their allies. Whether writing nonfiction or poetry, Bass is concerned with how to live well and how to help others do so.
Bass's critically acclaimed poetry collections include Mules of Love (2002), The Human Line (2007), Like a Beggar (2014), and Indigo (2020). Mules of Love won the Lambda Literary Award and The Human Line was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Bass has also won a Pushcart Prize, a Pablo Neruda Prize, a Larry Levis Reading Prize, and a New Letters Literary Prize. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, teaches in a low-residency MFA program at Pacific University, and works to bring poetry workshops into prison settings. Bass resides in Santa Cruz with her wife.
Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work centers on love, sex, food, relationships, conflict, and healing. In her poem "Basket of Figs," published in the 2002 collection Mules of Love, the speaker invites her lover to lay...
Ellen Bass is an American poet, writer, and teacher whose work is concerned with the complexity of life: relationships, conflict, the body, sexuality, and food. Bass's poem "The Thing Is," published in her 2002 collection Mules of Love, instructs...
