hooks chose not to capitalize any letters in her first and last name to emphasize focus on her message, and not herself or her identity. During this time, she published a book of poems, And There We Wept, under the pen name “bell hooks” - her great-grandmother’s name, and a woman who, hooks has said, was known for speaking her mind. In 1976, hooks began teaching as an English professor and lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later received her doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.īell hooks in 1988. She began the writing of her book Ain’t I A Woman during her English studies, and also worked as a telephone operator. It was at Stanford, in her Women’s Studies classes, that hooks began to notice a significant absence of black women from feminist literature. These would inspire and shape her life’s work fighting sexism and racism to come.Īfter graduating high school, hooks studied at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. When schools in the south became desegregated in the 1960s, hooks faced painful challenges among a predominantly white staff and student population. As a child, she enjoyed writing poetry, and developed a reverence for nature in the Kentucky hills, a landscape she has called a place of “magic and possibility.” Growing up in the south during the 1950s, hooks began her education in racially segregated schools. The life of bell hooks Early Life and Educationīell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in the fall of 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a family of seven children. Read on to learn more about bell hooks’ life and work, and to read some favorite pieces by and conversations with her. Her conversations with a number of important Buddhist leaders have been published on Lion’s Roar, along with her reflections on spirituality, race, feminism, and life. hooks also plays a part in the Buddhist community, drawing inspiration from Buddhist practice in her life and her work. Hooks’ writing is deeply personal and educational, drawing on her own painful experiences of racism and sexism in an effort to educate us on how to combat them.

Her expansive life’s work of writing and lecturing has explored the historical function of race and gender in America. Writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks has played a vital role in twenty-first-century activism.

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

Bell hooks love book