bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on the twenty-fifth of September 1952. She took her undergraduate degree at Stanford, her master's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983 on the work of Toni Morrison. She adopted the pen-name bell hooks — after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks, lowercase by deliberate choice — to put the focus on the words rather than the writer.

She produced, between 1981 and 2021, more than thirty books across cultural criticism, feminist theory, education, race, love, and the spiritual life. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) — drawing its title from Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech — was the first sustained analysis of the gap between mainstream second-wave feminism and the actual conditions of Black women's lives. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back (1989), Black Looks (1992), Teaching to Transgress (1994), and All About Love (2000) followed, each in turn becoming an assigned text in undergraduate humanities curricula across the English-speaking world.

She taught at Yale, Oberlin, the City College of New York, and finally at Berea College in Kentucky, where she established the bell hooks Institute in 2014.

She died at her home in Berea, Kentucky, on the fifteenth of December 2021, age sixty-nine. Her papers — and the contents of her library — were placed at Berea by her estate.

She is honored here as the theorist who carried Sojourner Truth's voice into the late twentieth century.