When bell hooks began her writing career, she chose a pen name in tribute to her mother Rosa Bell Watkins as well as her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks, who was known for her strong opinions. Born in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks — who stylized her name in lowercase to emphasize the work instead of the person behind it — rose to fame with her groundbreaking 1981 book, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. The unapologetic book laid the foundation for hooks’ career-long challenge to mainstream feminism to confront issues of race and class.

Over the course of her prolific career, hooks wrote more than 30 books spanning critical theory, memoir, children’s literature, and poetry, and was a committed educator at institutions such as Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York. In recent years, hooks’ influential book All About Love: New Visions (1999) has found an enthusiastic new audience on social media, more than 20 years after its publication. The book, a meditation on love as a transformative force not only for individuals but also for society, became a bestseller shortly before hooks’ death at the age of 69 in 2021.