On December 15, 2021, Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks, died at her home in Brea, Kentucky.
Hooks wrote more than 40 books, ranging from essays and poetry to children’s books. She wrote about how a person’s race, gender, and social class were interconnected.
Bell hooks wrote using her chosen pen name to honor her maternal great-grandmother, whose name was Bell Blair Hooks. About the unconventional lowercasing of her pen name, hooks said, “When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. 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.”
Her first published work under bell hooks was a collection of poems “And There We Wept” which was released in 1978. She was an inspiration to me, and her works are one of the reasons I became a feminist.
Bell hooks, a groundbreaking feminist thinker and writer, has died.
By: Attorney Mark Nicholson, Owner/CEO of the Law Office of Mark Nicholson
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