bell hooks, the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, an American acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, and writer. She published more than 30 books in her lifetime, covering topics including art, media, race, gender, feminism, capitalism, and intersectionality.
Her most notable works on feminism, including “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism”; “Yearning: Race Gender, and Cultural Politics.”
Using narrative as effectively as social theory, bell hooks has worked in a variety of genres, including poetry, essays, memoirs, self-help, and children's books, as well as appearing in documentaries and working in academia.
Gloria Watkins was born in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Hooks began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. She later taught at several institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York
Gloria Watkins was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Stanford University when she wrote her first draft of “Ain’t I A Woman,” and she published the book when she was 29 years old in 1981.
The debut appeared under her pen name, bell hooks, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Watkins wanted her pseudonym to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas.
“Ain’t I A Woman” became widely recognized as an important feminist text. It was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly in 1992.
Since then she has published three dozen books and taught in her home state of Kentucky at Berea College. She was the founder of the bell hooks Institute (2014) and is recognized globally as a feminist activist and cultural critic.
“I want my work to be about healing,” she said in 2018 when she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame. “I am a fortunate writer because every day of my life practically I get a letter, a phone call from someone who tells me how my work has transformed their life.”
hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.
Photo credit: The Bell Hooks Institute
