Discover the Best Books Written by Bell Hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name, bell hooks, was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. 

She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays and poetry to children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. She 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, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004 and founded the bell hooks Institute in 2014. Her pen name was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class African-American family. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins (née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins.

Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), Watkins writes of her "struggle to create self and identity" while growing up in "a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying." An avid reader (with poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gwendolyn Brooks among her favorites), Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools, later moving to an integrated school in the late 1960s.

She graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973 and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. During this time, Watkins was writing her book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which she began at the age of 19 (c. 1971) and then published in 1981.

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison entitled "Keeping a Hold on Life: Reading Toni Morrison's Fiction."