bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, one of six children of a janitor father and a mother who worked as a maid in white households (Carnegie Center). She later wrote under the name bell hooks, borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, and kept lowercase so readers would focus on the writing rather than the person behind it (Women’s History Museum). By age ten she was already writing poetry, reciting Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes in a segregated school taught mostly by unmarried Black women who shaped her early confidence (Women’s History Museum).

She started Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at nineteen, while an undergraduate at Stanford, and spent seven years finishing it before its 1981 publication (them.). Named after Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, the book examined how Black women had been sidelined by white men, Black men, and white women alike; Publishers Weekly would later rank it among the twenty most influential women’s books of the prior two decades (Carnegie Center). She earned her B.A. from Stanford in 1973, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz in 1983 with a dissertation on Toni Morrison (Carnegie Center).

hooks taught at Yale, Oberlin, and City College of New York before joining Berea College in Kentucky in 2004, where she founded the bell hooks Institute a decade later (Wikipedia). Across nearly forty books, including Yearning, Black Looks, and Homegrown, she kept circling the same conviction: that love is a practice, not a feeling, and that self-love underwrites the courage to speak. She died on December 15, 2021, in Berea, the town that had become her final academic home.