Distinguished Professor Gloria Jean Watkins – Bell Hooks
( September 25, 1952) -( December 15, 2021)
American author, theorist, educator, and social critic, Feminist
She is an American author, feminist, and social activist. Hooks was born in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class family. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. She had five sisters and one brother.She graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She obtained her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.
He influences includes: African-American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain’t I a Woman? inspired her first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education she embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, African-American writer James Baldwin, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, African-American black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her writing focused on race, capitalism and gender.what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination.She has published over 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.[She shed some light on the racism in the modern feminist movement in her writings (this made many women question her writing by challenging her writing style and claiming it was unorthodox).In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.A prevalent theme in her most recent writing is the community and communion, the ability of loving communities to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities. In three conventional books and four children’s books, she suggests that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are crucial to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities.
She has held positions as Professor of African-American Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York.In 2004, she joined Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, as Distinguished Professor in Residence.
\She has undertaken three scholar-in-residences at The New School. Mostly recently she did one for a week in October 2014. She engaged in public dialogues with Gloria Steinem,[19] Laverne Cox,[20] and Cornel West.
Bell Hooks Awards and Nominations
• Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
• Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years” by Publishers Weekly (1992)
• bell hooks: The Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund (1994)
• Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
• Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year (2002)
• Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
• bell hooks: Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life”
bell hooks: The Atlantic Monthly’s “One of our nation’s leading public