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. 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.
This experience greatly influenced her perspective as an educator, and it inspired scholarship on education practices as seen in her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), Watkins would write 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." Īn 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. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins ( née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, to a working-class African-American family, in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. On December 15, 2021, bell hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.
Her pen name was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. In 2014, hooks also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College. 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.
She began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. 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 is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College.
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