Women’s History Month’s Feature: bell hooks, Author, Educator, and Social Activist

Hello book lovers! In celebration of Women’s History Month, I would like to present to you author, educator, and social activist, bell hooks (birth name – Gloria Jean Watkins). Her pen name was adopted from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She graduated from Stanford University (BA), University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA), and University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD).

Most of her work centered on intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender and addressed love, class, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Her work spans around 40 books, ranging from essays, poetry, and children’s books. She published a number of scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films and engaged in public lectures.

In 1976, she began her academic career teaching English and ethnic studies at several academic institutions before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky in 2004. While there, she founded the bell hooks Institute in 2014 along with professor Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou to provide underrepresented students, especially black and brown, femme, queer, and Appalachian individuals to develop their activism, education and other work. She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.

Throughout her writing career, she won several awards including the American Book Awards/Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991), The Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund (1994), Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image nominee (2001), Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year (2002) and the most recent TIME 100 Women of the Year (2020). Although she is gone, she will definitely not be forgotten for the trailblazer that she was (1952 – 2021).

Writing Tip: I will focus on bell hook’s writing of children’s books. When writing such books nothing beats including affirmations and positive messages that resound with children so they can learn to love themselves. Illustrations filled with colorful and lively images help to draw the children into the stories and make reading a fun experience.

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