bell hooks

bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021) was an American author, cultural critic and feminist scholar whose books on race, gender and class, including Ain't I a Woman? (1981) and All About Love: New Visions, reached both academic and general readers. She was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on 25 September 1952 and died in Berea, Kentucky, on 15 December 2021.

She took her pen name from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, and wrote it in lower case to keep attention on her ideas rather than herself. Her first publication under it was the poetry chapbook And There We Wept (1978). She studied English at Stanford (BA, 1973) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, 1976), and earned a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983 with a dissertation on Toni Morrison. She taught at Yale, Oberlin College and City College of New York, among others, and from 2004 at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was founded in 2014.

Her first major book, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, appeared from South End Press in 1981, followed by Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (South End Press, 1984) and Feminism Is for Everybody (South End Press, 2000). All About Love: New Visions came from William Morrow (listed in Wikipedia's bibliography as 1999) and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love from Atria Books in 2004.

For collectors

Her early books were first issued by South End Press: Ain't I a Woman? (1981), widely taught in gender and Black studies courses, and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984). Her poetry chapbook And There We Wept (Golemics, Los Angeles, 1978) predates both.