She went on to study at Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and UC Santa Cruz, bringing a commitment to community and the spirit of Black self-determination forged in the Kentucky hills to the confined spaces of academia. Hooks would eventually leave Kentucky, citing her family’s move away from the hillside and into the fabric of mainstream society - as well as the racialized violence that framed her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s - as the impetus for her urge for other milieus.

Her chosen name is an homage to her great grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, styled in lowercase to decenter herself in deference to her family and the work she would go on to produce, publishing over 30 books and scholarly articles - a lodestar for decades of Black feminist writing and scholarship - before her untimely passing at 69. It’s in the crevices of Appalachian dissent and Southern discontent that bell hooks, née Gloria Watkins, was born, in the small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952. The hills of Kentucky are enveloped in a legacy of resistance - first against the white colonizers who touched the Indigenous land we call America, and later against a state that confined an increasingly nonconformist working class, derogatorily designated hillbillies.

She viewed her radical work as one of the purest expressions of love for Black people there is.

Bell hooks love