Bass was born on June 16, 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bass attended Goucher College, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1968 with her bachelor’s degree. She pursued a master’s degree at Boston University and graduated in 1970. From 1970–1974, Bass worked as an administrator at Project Place, a social service center in Boston. Bass has been teaching Writing About Our Lives workshops since 1974 in Santa Cruz, California. She also teaches nationally and internationally at writing conferences and universities.

In the early 1970s, Bass also began publishing her own and others’ poetry. In 1973, she coedited (with Florence Howe) a collection of poems entitled No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women. This collection included selections of Bass’s own poetry, but she soon began to publish her own volumes, beginning with I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter, which was also published in 1973. Her other poetry collections include Of Separateness and Merging (1977), For Earthly Survival (1980), Our Stunning Harvest: Poems (1985) and Mules of Love (2002), which includes, “And What If I Spoke of Despair,” a poem that was chosen for the 2002 Editor’s Prize from the Missouri Review.

Bass is most known for her nonfiction works, such as The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988) and Beginning to Heal: A First Book for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1993), both of which she wrote with Laura Davis. These books, and others like it, have helped countless survivors come to terms with their painful pasts and move on with their lives.