bell hooks

Her father swept floors and her mother cleaned white people's houses in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and she was one of six children reading Wordsworth and Gwendolyn Brooks in a segregated school. Then the schools integrated in the late 1960s and she learned what a classroom can take from a student as well as give, which is the experience she spent a career writing about. She got out on her own terms, to Stanford, and took a degree in English there in 1973. She was 19 when she began the book that made her, and it took a decade to reach print. She published it under her great-grandmother's name, Bell Blair Hooks, in lower case, so that readers would look at the argument rather than the author.

She started teaching in 1976 and published a chapbook of poems in 1978 under the name she kept. Ain't I a Woman came in 1981 and argued that the feminism on offer had been built by white women who mistook their own position for everyone's, and that Black women had been written out of both the movement and the histories it drew on. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center followed in 1984, and Teaching to Transgress in 1994, which made the classroom itself the subject. She wrote nearly 40 books in all — criticism, memoir, poetry, children's picture books, film essays — and kept the prose clear of scholarly apparatus, because she wanted to be read across class lines. She taught at Yale, Oberlin and City College before going home to Kentucky.

She spent 30 years inside institutions whose class and race arrangements she attacked in print, and she did not soften it for the room. Invited to give the commencement address at Southwestern University in 2002, she used it to attack state violence and to reproach the graduates in front of her for going along with it. Much of the audience booed, and a few graduates walked past the provost to hug her. She was as hard on her own side. She read Spike Lee's Malcolm X as a film that invited weeping instead of fighting, and Paris Is Burning as a spectacle arranged for the pleasure of white spectators. And the writer whose book on love found its largest audience two decades later told an interviewer in 2017 that she had no partner and had been celibate for 17 years.

She died of kidney failure at home in Berea on December 15, 2021, at 69. What happened next is unusual for an academic: the readership grew. All About Love, published in 2000, reached the New York Times bestseller list more than 20 years later, carried by readers who came to her through the protests of 2020 and found a writer who treated love as a political practice. Time had already named her one of its 100 women of the century, the rare public intellectual who reached wide by being readable. Her papers are at Berea College, where she taught for her last 17 years, and the center she founded there carries her name in lower case.

bell hooks's life against the full span of the corpus.

• And There We Wept book
  A chapbook of poems, the first thing she published as bell hooks 1978
• Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism book
  Begun when she was 19. Named by Publishers Weekly one of the 20 most influential women's books of two decades. 1981
• Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center book
  Her case against the racism of second-wave feminism 1984
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom book
  Engaged pedagogy, built partly on Paulo Freire 1994
• All About Love: New Visions book
  It reached the bestseller list more than 20 years after publication 2000
• The bell hooks Institute company
  Founded at Berea College, where she left her papers in 2017 2014

• 1973 aged ~21 Takes a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford
• 1976 aged ~24 Begins teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California
• 1978 aged ~26 Publishes her first book, a chapbook of poems, as bell hooks
• 1981 aged ~29 Publishes Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism She had started it a decade earlier, as an undergraduate.
• 1983 aged ~31 Finishes a doctorate at UC Santa Cruz with a dissertation on Toni Morrison
• 1994 aged ~42 Publishes Teaching to Transgress and joins City College of New York
• 2002 aged ~50 Is booed at a Southwestern University commencement for attacking state violence Several graduates crossed the stage past the provost to hug her anyway.
• 2004 aged ~52 Joins Berea College in Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence
• December 15, 2021 aged 69 Dies of kidney failure at her home in Berea

• Toni Morrison 1931–2019
  Nobel laureate whose novels, including Beloved, explored the African American experience with profound lyricism. wrote her dissertation on
• Sojourner Truth 1797–1883
  Abolitionist and women's rights activist whose Ain't I a Woman? speech became a rallying cry for equality. took her first title from
• Betty Friedan 1921–2006
  Author of The Feminine Mystique and founding president of the National Organization for Women. the feminism she criticized
• Kimberlé Crenshaw b. 1959
  Legal scholar who coined the term intersectionality, reshaping understandings of overlapping discrimination. the framework she helped ground
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. read as a girl in Kentucky
• Angela Davis b. 1944
  Political activist and academic whose scholarship on race, class, and prisons became globally influential. contemporary on the Black left