Bass grew up in Pleasantville, New Jersey, where her parents owned a liquor store. Her family later moved to Ventnor City, New Jersey.[citation needed] 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. From 1970 to 1974, Bass worked at Project Place, a social service center in Boston.[1][2]
From 1983 to 2003, she worked in the field of healing from childhood sexual abuse: writing the best-selling The Courage to Heal in 1991, developing training seminars for professionals, offering workshops for survivors, and lecturing to mental health professionals nationally and internationally. She is a co-founder of the Survivors Healing Center in Santa Cruz, a non-profit organization offering services to survivors of child sexual abuse.
Bass has taught poetry at the low-residencyMaster of Fine Arts program at Pacific University in Oregon since 2007.[2][3] She has taught workshops in Santa Cruz, California[4] since 1974 and also nationally.[5] 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 six weekly workshops to men and women incarcerated in the Santa Cruz County jails.
Among Bass' poetry books are Indigo, (2020) which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishers Triangle Award and the Northern California Book Award; Like a Beggar (2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award; The Human Line (2007), and Mules of Love (2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker,[6] the American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.[7]
Her nonfiction books include I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (HarperCollins, 1996), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008), which has been translated into twelve languages.[7]
Bass was named the Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 2019.
Bass lives in Santa Cruz, California with her wife, Janet Bryer. She has two children, Saraswati Bryer-Bass and Max Bryer-Bass.
Awards
Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman's Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes (2003, 2015, 2017), Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council.[1][8]
Indigo, (2020) was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishers Triangle Award and the Northern California Book Award. Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) was named among the notable books of 2007 in the poetry section by the San Francisco Chronicle,[7] and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002) won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award.[8]
Susan Griffin is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works.
I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sex Abuse is a 1983 book edited by Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton and marked Bass's first published non-fiction work. It was published by Harper and Row and contains a collection of numerous child sexual abuse testimonials from a wide range of original source material including book excerpts, poems, and essays. The work was republished in 1991 through Harper Perennial and included a new afterword by Bass.
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The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse is a self-help book by poet Ellen Bass and Laura Davis that focuses on recovery from child sexual abuse and has been called "controversial and polarizing".
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Rebecca Seiferle is an American poet.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.
The Survivors Healing Center is a not-for-profit located in Santa Cruz County, California. Founded in 1987, its mission is to provide services for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and educate the public and service agencies about the issue. According to the Santa Cruz Volunteer Center, the Survivors Healing Center is one of the few centers in the world that focuses primarily on childhood sexual abuse.
Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian poet who now lives in the United States.
Eliana Gil, is a lecturer, writer, and clinician of marriage, family and child. She is on the board of a number of professional counselling organizations that use play and art therapies, and she is the former president of the Association for Play Therapy (APT).
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