Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Other poetry collections include Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)—which was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award—The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973).
Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun and many other journals and anthologies. She was awarded Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council and received 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, and four Pushcart Prizes.
In an interview with The Adroit Journal, she was asked what role revision played as she put the manuscript for Indigo together: “I don’t see a clear division between writing and revision. Very very occasionally, a poem comes out almost whole on a first draft. A kind of gift. I think of it as the muse deciding to throw me a bone for all the hours and days and weeks that I write and can’t cobble anything of worth together. But the majority of my poems emerge from extensive writing and rewriting, visioning and revisioning. I agree with Richard Tillinghast who wrote, “Revising is not so much a task as it is a romance.” I think of the first draft as a first date and with each successive draft, I’m getting to know the poem better, it reveals more of itself to me and I learn how to listen to it.”
Her non-fiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse(Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages.
Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.
