Booking and details
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Dates Tues, Apr 8, 2025 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The 2024-25 Poetry season concludes with a finale reading by Ellen Bass. Bass’s most recent poetry books include Indigo, Like a Beggar, and The Human Line. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction works include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. Bass, chosen by a group of Folger Poetry supporters, will read from the work of other poets cited as a literary influence, as well as from her own work. A moderated conversation will follow the reading, with a bookselling and signing at the post-reading reception.
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About the poet
Ellen Bass
Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Previous books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Bass was co-editor with Florence Howe of the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes and the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Selected works
When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.
