Happy Birthday, bell hooks

Born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates author, theorist, educator, and cultural critic Gloria Jean Watkins, known to readers as bell hooks, on the seventy-second anniversary of her birth. hooks opted for a lowercase spelling of her name as a way to emphasize the seriousness of the topics and decenter herself; she published over forty books comprising essays, poetry, and children’s stories.

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As part of its 100 Women of the Year series, Time Magazine chose bell hooks for its imagined cover for 1984, with this text.

“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write, ‘too much.’..No woman has ever written enough.”

bell hooks in 2009

“Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.”

First published work of nonfiction:

• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End Press, 1981.

A sampling of hooks’s many books: Remembered Rapture (1999) is a meditation on the confidential happenings between the writer, her pen, and the page. All about Love: New Visions (2000) is the first of the Love Song to the Nation trilogy. The Will to Change (2004) explores the harmful effects of toxic masculinity and patriarchy.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

Unfortunately, bell hooks’s books have not yet been collected. However, you can read these reviews of her work from Publishers Weekly. You can visit the bell hooks collection or bell hooks books to browse a good selection of titles. Finally, the New York Public Library published this guide to the works of bell hooks.

Essay by bell hooks listed in Notable, The Best American Essays:

• “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2000; listed in 2001 edition.

See also, works by authors whose essays have appeared in (R) or been listed in Notables (N) in The Best American Essays series: 

• Min Jin Lee, In Praise of Bell Hooks, New York Times, 2019. (BAE 2020, N)

Read excerpts from the last interview with bell hooks reprinted in the Washington Post, July 2023.

Read an interview: “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness,” New York Times, December 2015.

Watch: Becoming bell hooks, PBS, 2024.

Watch: Speaking Freely: bell hooks, 2016.

Visit the bell hooks Center at Berea College.