bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as bell hooks, was born September 25, 1952 to a mother who was a homemaker and a father who worked as a custodian. hooks was born in segregated Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and for a time, was educated in racially segregated public schools. She acquired her picturesque pen name from her maternal great-grandmother, whose name is Bell Blair Hooks.

In 1973, she received her BA in English from Stanford University, and three years later obtained her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. hooks was a professor, social activist, intellectual, cultural critic, feminist and author of 40 books, including Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Reel to Real, and All About Love: New Visions.

In 2014, the bell hooks Institute was founded at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. In 2021, after a long period of illness, she died of kidney failure at her home, also in Berea.