bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on the twenty-fifth of September 1952, one of seven children raised in a segregated Southern town. From the schoolrooms of her youth she carried a hunger for words that would never leave her, and in time she took a pen name — bell hooks — borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She kept it deliberately in lowercase, wishing the reader to attend to the substance of the ideas rather than to the person who wrote them.

She was schooled in mind as well as spirit. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1973, her master's from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976, and, in 1983, her doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing her dissertation on the novelist Toni Morrison. Even before the doctorate was conferred, she had begun the work that would define her: her first major book, "Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism," took its title from Sojourner Truth and announced a voice that would not be silenced.

Across nearly forty books — essays, poetry, memoir, and children's literature — she examined how race, gender, and class interlock to produce systems of domination, and she insisted, always, on love as a political and healing force. She taught at Stanford, Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York before returning home to Kentucky, joining Berea College in 2004 as Distinguished Professor in Residence, where the bell hooks Institute was founded to keep her thought alive.

She died in Berea, Kentucky, on the fifteenth of December 2021, at the age of sixty-nine. She had carried the questions of Sojourner Truth into her own century and answered them in a clear, unflinching voice. May the honored name of bell hooks endure, and may the love and truth she taught continue to free those who read her.