Celebrating bell hooks

Famed Author, Poet and Feminist Dies at Age 69

By Tiffany Young and Helene Fisher

Social media is full of woes and tearful recollections of how bell hooks impacted Black women’s lives and love of self and others.  Without her, I doubt if self-care would be a part of this woman’s ritual of self- preservation and values.  Just this morning a young woman of 19 years sat with me at a community book store mourning a woman she only just discovered via social media.  The book store was sold out of all of bell hooks’ books. I shared with her what I learned from hooks’ writings and lectures in which I was fortunate to experience.  I bought her a copy of Sula in lieu of the now back-ordered copies of All About Love.

Known as a poet first, bell hooks’ most recent career was that of a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, she passed away at the age of 69 on December 15 after battling a lengthy illness. One of the country's foremost feminist scholars, she was also famous for her writing on race, gender and sexuality, bringing intersectionality to the forefront of women’s study before the term was created. Having published more than 30 books over the course of her lifetime, including 1981's "Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism" and "All About Love" in 1999, hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins and used the pen name "bell hooks,” which was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction, for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and for an NAACP Image Award, hooks was the true definition of a champion.

In the late 1970s, it was a tumultuous time. In some ways, the decade was a continuation of the 1960s. Women, African Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians and other marginalized people continued their fight for equality. While this was going on, hooks published her first book of poems, “And There We Wept,” in 1978. A few years later, after getting some recognition she was claiming her spot as it relates to race and gender and her early writing about feminist theory, including the 1984 text “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” has been highly influential. She continued to make strides in examining the effect of racism and sexism on Black women.  The lens in which she viewed feminism created much dialogue within the women’s study academic sphere leading to a dichotomy between feminism and womanism.  She pushes the envelope in her writing and helped defines what it means to be a feminist.

Throughout her career, bell hooks explored the past and the present and the intersectionality of race, gender and economics in the lives of women dating back to hooks’ dissertation study of Toni Morrison’s Sula and The Bluest Eyes.  hooks was monumental in the lives of her generation of Black women but more so in the following generations as Black communities evolved from hooks’ segregated hometown in Kentucky and the shifting world of academia at Stanford University, University of Wisconson-Madison, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Rest in Power, beloved ancestor, Mama bell.