In Memoriam : bell hooks, trailblazing feminist writer (1952 – 2021)

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bell hooks, the beloved writer, poet, feminist and professor, has died at her home in Berea, KY. Berea College, the college where she taught, made the announcement. She was 69 years old.

“Berea College is deeply saddened about the death of bell hooks, Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, prodigious author, public intellectual and one of the country’s foremost feminist scholars,” the college wrote.

bell hooks, a feminist writer

Known for her writing on race, gender and sexuality, hooks published more than 30 books over the course of her career, including 1981’s “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism” and “All About Love” in 1999.

Throughout her life, Hooks’ dedication to attainable feminist theory remained steadfast. In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Hooks stated that her main intention was to “produce theory that people could use.”

“I have this phrase that I use, ‘working with the work,'” hooks said. “So if somebody comes up to me, and they have one of those bell hooks books that’s abused and battered, and every page is underlined, I know they’ve been working with the work. And that’s where it is for me.”

moniker

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks took her pen name after her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She chose to lowercase her name so readers would focus on the “substance of books, not who I am,” she said, during an appearance at Rollins College in 2013. She also explained the choice in a 2011 interview, noting that this idea of “moving away from the idea of the person” was popular in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the feminist movement.

“It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it,” hooks said. “Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.”

She taught at multiple universities and won multiple awards during the course of her career including a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the national book award for fiction and an NAACP Image Award nomination.