Bernice Olds Ames (1915-1976) was an American poet. Her work appeared in Midwest Quarterly, University Review, Yankee, Christian Science Monitor, and in many other publications. She was a member of the Poetry Society of America, and its Bernice W. Ames Award is named for her (though with an incorrect middle initial).

Ames took a trip during the summer of 1936 at the age of 21, which began on the S.S. Lafayette from New York on June 27 and returned to New York on the S.S. Champlain on August 21, then home to Corry, PA, on August 22. In her “My Trip Abroad” journal that she kept during the trip, she wrote a poem each and every day. These are her earliest known poems. She married in 1937; she and her husband Eli had four children (Lauren, Murray, Carolyn and Roger). Although Ames wrote a small number of short stories, she concentrated on perfecting her skill as a craftsman in the art of writing poetry. She published four books of poetry : Where the Light Bends (1955), In Syllables of Stars (1958), Antelope Bread (1966), and A Fragile Holding (1977). A Fragile Holding, a collaboration among several close fellow poets, was published posthumously and includes this tribute to Ames:

Balanced precariously on the rim of life, “B” kept on writing poems right up to the end. She never spoke of death, though she must have known how close it hovered all that last year. Perhaps she sensed what we know – that in her poems she still lives, burning with her delicate cool fire.

[&scrc_name; extends its thanks to the family of Bernice Olds Ames for their assistance with this biographical sketch.]