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...