Alison Bass

Alison Bass is an award-winning journalist and author who teaches journalism at West Virginia University. Her second nonfiction book, Getting Screwed: Sex Work and the Law, published in October 2015, weaves the true stories of sex workers with the latest research on prostitution into a gripping journalistic narrative. Her book argues that U.S. laws criminalizing prostitution are not only largely ineffective in curbing the sex trade, but create an atmosphere that encourages the exploitation of sex workers and violence against all women. Her first book, Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, won the prestigious NASW Science in Society Award in 2009.

Bass was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and a series of articles she wrote about psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. She was the first Globe reporter to break the story of a sexually abusive priest in Massachusetts (Father Porter), a decade before the Globe's Spotlight team did its path-breaking work on the priest abuse scandal. Her work has also appeared in Harvard University's Nieman Reports, The Miami Herald, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post and Technology Review, among other publications. She writes a blog at www.alison-bass.com/blog about public health issues. Before coming to West Virginia as an Assistant Professor of Journalism, Bass taught at Brandeis University and Mount Holyoke College.

In 2007, she won an Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects, which was published by Algonquin Press in 2008.

External links

• Official Website