hooks, bell -- 1952- | Berea College Special Collections and Archives Catalog

Name: hooks, bell -- 1952-

Variant Name: Watkins, Gloria Jean -- 1952-

Historical Note: hooks, bell; Gloria Jean Watkins; intellectual, feminist, educator, cultural critic, social activist, poet; born 24 September 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, United States; BA in English, Stanford University (1968); MA in English, University of Wisconsin (1976); PhD in literature, University of California, Santa Cruz (1983); assumed her great-grandmother's name hooks as homage to female legacies and rendered it in lowercase to accentuate the substance of her work, rather than her identity; adopted the name bell hooks in 1978 with the release of her first book of poems, And There We Wept; she has used the alias ever since; wrote more than thirty books and numerous essays on the arts and pop culture; joined the faculty of Oberlin College (1988) and City College of New York -- Women's Studies and English departments (1995); joined the faculty of Kentucky's Berea College as the Distinguished Professor in Residence (2004)

Sources: African American National Biography, accessed via The Oxford African American Studies Center online database, July 27, 2014

Records or Manuscript Collections Created by hooks, bell -- 1952-