bell hooks essays

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To Read bell hooks Was to Love Her

bell hooks taught the world two things: how to critique and how to love. Perhaps the two lessons were both sides of the same coin. To read bell hooks is to become initiated into the power and inclusiveness of Black feminism whether you are a Black woman or not. With her wide array of essays of cultural criticism from the 1980s and 1990s, hooks dared to love Blackness and criticize the patriarchy out loud; she was generous and attentive in her analysis of pop culture as a self-proclaimed “bad girl.” Sadly, the announcement of her death this week, at 69 , adds to a too-long list of Black thinkers, artists, and public figures gone too soon. While many of us feel heavy with grief at the loss of hooks and her contributions to arts, letters, and ideas, we are also voraciously reading and rereading both in mourning and celebration of her impact as a critical theorist, a professor, a poet, a lover, and a thinker.

As a professor of Black feminisms at Cornell University, where I often teach classes featuring bell hooks’s work, I see a syllabus as having the potential to be a love letter, a mixtape for revolution. hooks’s voice was daring, cutting, and unapologetic, whether she was taking Beyoncé and Spike Lee to task or celebrating the raunchiness of Lil’ Kim. What hooks accomplished for Black feminism over decades, on and off the page, was having built a movement of inclusively cultivated communities and solidarity across social differences. Quotes and ideas of Black feminist thinkers tend to circulate across the internet as inspirational self-help mantras that can end up being surface-level engagements, but as bell hooks shows us, there has always been a vibrant radical tradition of Black women and femmes unafraid to speak their minds. bell hooks was the prerequisite reading that we are lucky to discover now or to return to as a ceremony of remembrance. Here are nine texts I’d suggest to anyone seeking to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with her work.

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

Publishing over 30 books over the course of her career, perhaps the most well-known is her first, Ain’t I a Woman. Referencing Sojourner Truth’s famous words, hooks drew a direct line between herself and the radical tradition of outspoken Black women demanding freedom. Before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1991, hooks exemplified the importance of the interlocking nature of Black feminism within freedom movements, weaving together the histories of abolitionism in the United States, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights era. She refused to let white feminism or abolitionist men alone define this chapter of America’s past. Finding power and freedom in the margins, she lived a feminist life without apology by centering Black women as historical figures.

Keeping a Hold of Life: Reading Toni Morrison’s Fiction (1983)

To read bell hooks is to become enrolled as a student in her extensive coursework. Keeping a Hold of Life shows us her student writing and another side of her political formation as Black feminist literary theorist. hooks earned her Ph.D. from University of California Santa Cruz in 1983 despite having spent years teaching literature beforehand, and in her dissertation she analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye and Sula, celebrating both books’ depictions of Black femininity and kinship. For those who are students, it may be encouraging to see hooks’s dedication to learning: Before she got her degree, she had already published a field-defining text. But that wasn’t the end of her scholarly journey by a long shot.

Black Looks : Race and Representation (1992)

I love teaching the timeless essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” from this collection above all because it is the first one of hers I read as a college sophomore. In it, she reflects on what she overhears as a professor at Yale about so-called ethnic food and interracial dating. In some ways, the through-line of hooks’s writing can be summed up here, in the way she examines what it means to consume and be consumed, especially for women of color. In another essay from the collection, “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks taught her readers the subversive power of looking , especially looking done by colonized peoples; drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, she grappled with the power of visual culture and its stakes for domination in the lives of Black women, in particular. (She mentions that she got her start in film criticism after being grossed out by Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It .) Her criticism shaped feminist film theory and continues to be celebrated as a crucial way to understand the politics of looking back.

Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)

bell hooks was a diligent student of Black feminism, and she was more than happy to pass along what she learned, having taught at various points during her career at the University of Southern California, the New School, Oberlin College, Yale University, and CUNY’s City College. In turn, she often reflected on what she learned from teaching in her writings. In this volume, hooks contributes to radicalizing education theory in ways that even now have been understated: She understood schooling as a battleground and space of cultivating knowledge, writing that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” In 2004, she returned to her home state, Kentucky, for her final teaching post at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was founded in 2014 and to which she dedicated her papers in 2017.

“ Hardcore Honey: bell hooks Goes on the Down Low With Lil’ Kim ,” Paper Magazine (1997)

In this 1997 interview, hooks vibes with Lil’ Kim and probes the rapper’s politics of desire, sex work. It’s an example of how she was invested in remaining part of the contemporary conversations around Black life and feminine sexuality. Though she described Lil’ Kim’s hyperfemme aesthetic as “boring straight-male porn fantasy” and wondered out loud who was responsible for the styling of her image as a celebrity and part of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. (“the boys in charge”), she defends Lil’ Kim against the puritanical attacks that she notes have been made against Black women time and again: In hooks’s opening question, she tells Lil’ Kim, “Nobody talks about John F. Kennedy being a ho ’cause he fucked around. But the moment a woman talks about sex or is known to be having too much sex, people talk about her as a ho. So I wanted you to talk about that a little bit.”

All About Love: New Visions (2000)

hooks was especially prolific during the 1990s, publishing about a book a year. The early aughts marked a shift in her intellectual focus away from cultural theory and toward love as a radical act. In this book, she details her personal life, drawing on romantic experiences and what she learned from experiences with boyfriends. With words from 20 years ago that remain trenchant to this day, hooks writes, “I feel our nation’s turning away from love … moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” For her, love was not a mere sentiment but something deeply revolutionary that should inform all of Black feminist thought.

“ Beyoncé’s Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best ,” The Guardian (2016)

In bell hooks’s scathing review of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade , she took issue with what she perceived as the singer’s commodification of Black sexualized femininity as liberatory. She calls out Beyoncé’s branding and links the legacy of the auction block to what hooks sees as a repetition of the valuation of Black women’s sexualized bodies, warning of the dangers of circulating such images as faux sexual liberation, dictated by capitalist marketing dollars. “Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life,” hooks wrote, “much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” (As was to be expected, the Beyhive did not take kindly to the critique, and it remains an ideological fault line for many of the singer’s fans.)

Happy to Be Nappy (2017)

While most likely first encountered the writings of bell hooks in a college seminar on feminism or decolonization, some were introduced to bell hooks in their early years, during bedtime stories. Understanding self-esteem and image for Black children as deeply political and encoded in the way they view their hair, she wrote a children’s book for them, Happy to Be Nappy. Remembering the impact of the Doll Test — the 1940s psychological experiment cited by the NAACP lawyers behind Brown v. Board of Education , where Black children were observed to assign positive qualities to white dolls and negative ones to Black dolls — and how important representation is, writing this book was a radical act of love.

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012)

From interviews to cultural criticism to academic dissertations, bell hooks did not limit herself to a singular form of writing. She was promiscuous in genre, and her approach was to say whatever needed urgent saying about the interlocking structure of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism — however it needed to be said. Reading one of her final books, a poetry collection, helps us to return with her to Kentucky, where she spent her last years. She loved the expanse of the Black diaspora, but she held close the U.S. South, particularly Black Appalachia. Here, she paints in words the rural landscape and its local ecologies, where stolen land and stolen lives converge, touching on how the landscape of the mountains has been home to people like her, whom she describes as “black, Native American, white, all ‘people of one blood.’” It is a literary homecoming that frames her homegoing. To truly read bell hooks necessitates rereading her again and again, and this act forms its own ritual of elegy, of celebrating the life of someone whose foundational impact cannot be overstated.

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Perspective

With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure.

Lisa B. Thompson

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York. Karjean Levine/Getty Images hide caption

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York.

"We black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as they see us reach our goal – no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid – they will take courage and follow." bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

Arts & Life

Trailblazing feminist author, critic and activist bell hooks has died at 69.

There are well-worn bell hooks books scattered throughout my library. She's in nearly every section – race, class, film, cultural studies – and, as expected, her books take up an entire shelf in the feminism section. I doubt I would have survived this long without her work, and the work of other Black feminist thinkers of her generation, to guide me. I've retrieved every bell hooks book today, and the unwieldy stack comforts me as I assess the impact of her loss.

If you ever heard hooks speak, it would come as no surprise that she first attended college to study drama, as she recounted in a 1992 essay. In the 1990s she blessed my college campus for a week, and I was mesmerized by lectures that were deliciously brilliant yet full of humor. Her banter with the audience during the Q&A floated easily between thoughtful answers, deep questioning and sly quips that kept us at rapt attention. Her words garner just as much attention on the page. She was a prolific writer, and her intellectual curiosity was boundless.

Discovering bell hooks changed the lives of countless Black women and girls. After picking up one of her many titles – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism – the world suddenly made sense. She reordered the universe by boldly gifting us with the language and theories to understand who we were in an often hostile and alienating society.

She also made clear that, as Black women, we belonged to no one but ourselves. A bad feminist from the start, hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms. She implored us to transgress and struggle, but to do so with love and fearlessness. Her brave, bold and beautiful words not only spoke truth to power, but also risked speaking that same truth to and about our beloved icons and culture.

As we traversed hostile spaces in academia, corporate America, the arts, medicine and sometimes our own families, hooks not only taught us how to love ourselves, but also insisted that we seek justice. She helped us to better understand and, if necessary, forgive the women who birthed and raised us. She claimed feminism without apology, and encouraged Black women in particular to embrace feminism, and to do more than simply identify their oppression, but to envision new ways of being in the world. She called on us to honor early pioneers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who first claimed the mantle of women's rights.

The lower-case name bell hooks published under challenged a system of academic writing that historically belittled and ignored the work of Black scholars. She also used language that was as plain and as clear as her politics. While her writing was deeply personal, often carved from her own experiences, her ideas were relentlessly rigorous and full of citations—even though she eschewed footnotes, another refusal of the academy's standards that endeared her to those of us determined to remake intellectual traditions that denied our very humanity.

Rejecting footnotes seemed to symbolize the fact that the knowledge hooks most valued could not fit into those tiny spaces. Her writing style hinted at the fact that her ideas were always more expansive than even her books could hold. While there were no footnotes, her books were love notes to a people she loved fiercely.

No matter where she taught or lived, bell hooks always kept Kentucky and her family ties close. She frequently claimed her southern Black working-class background and an abiding love for her home. Although she was educated at prestigious schools, she always spoke with the wisdom and wit of our mothers, grandmothers and aunties. Her return to the Bluegrass State and Berea College towards the end of her career has a narrative elegance. A generation of feminists has lost a foundational figure and a beloved icon, but her legacy lives on in her writing, which will provide sustenance for generations to come.

Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow her @drlisabthompson on Twitter and Instagram .

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• Official Site of Bell hooks Books
• BlackPast.org - Biography of Bell Hooks
• BFI - Bell hooks on cinema: a remembrance
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• NPR - Trailblazing feminist author, critic and activist bell hooks has died at 69
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bell hooks (born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville , Kentucky , U.S.—died December 15, 2021, Berea , Kentucky) was an American scholar and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender , and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities.

Watkins grew up in a segregated community of the American South. At age 19 she began writing what would become her first full-length book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , which was published in 1981. She studied English literature at Stanford University (B.A., 1973), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1976), and the University of California , Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 1983).

Hooks assumed her pseudonym, the name of her great-grandmother, to honour female legacies; she preferred to spell it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She taught English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California from the mid-1970s, African and Afro-American studies at Yale University during the ’80s, women’s studies at Oberlin College and English at the City College of New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004 she became a professor in residence at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The bell hooks Institute was founded at the college in 2014.

In the 1980s hooks established a support group for Black women called the Sisters of the Yam, which she later used as the title of a book, published in 1993, celebrating Black sisterhood. Her other writings included Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995), Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996), Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999), Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000), Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), and the companion books We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003) and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004). Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice was published in 2012. She also wrote a number of autobiographical works, such as Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) and Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997).

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Activist and writer bell hooks was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky as Gloria Jean Watkins. As a child, hooks performed poetry readings of work by Gwendolyn Brooks , Langston Hughes , and Elizabeth Barrett Browning . She earned a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from the University of California-Santa Cruz.   hooks was the author of over 30 books, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 20 most influential books published in 20 years; Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984); Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1991), winner of the American Book Award/Before Columbus Foundation Award; Teaching to Transgress (1994); the children’s book Homemade Love (2002), named the Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year; and the poetry collections And There We Wept (1978) and When Angels Speak of Love (2005), and Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Award.   Throughout her life, hooks explored the relationship between sexism, racism, and economic disparity in books aimed at scholars and at the public. In an interview with Bomb Magazine , she said, “To think of certain ways of writing as activism is crucial. What does it matter if we write eloquently about decolonization if it’s just white privileged kids reading our eloquent theory about it? Masses of black people suffer from internalized racism, our intellectual work will never impact on their lives if we do not move it out of the academy. That’s why I think mass media is so important.”   hooks was the winner of the Writer’s Award from the Lila-Wallace—Reader’s Digest Fund, and has been named one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals by the Atlantic. She taught at the USC, Yale University, Oberlin College, the City College of New York, and Berea College.

hooks died in late 2021 at the age of 69.

Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)

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bell hooks – Ideas for Social Justice

By Commons Volunteer Librarian , E. T. Smith

bell hooks made significant contributions to the theory and practice of social justice. This article summarises three key concepts and provides a guide to her many writings as well as videos and audio of presentations and interviews.

Introduction

bell hooks (1952-2021) chose this name, and styled it in lower-case, in an effort to focus attention on the substantive ideas within her writing, rather than her identity as an isolated individual. To situate those ideas, bell hooks drew on academic scholarship and popular culture as well as her relevant personal perspectives: especially as a Black woman living in America; as an educator and activist; and as the first in her family to gain a university education.

Many of the ideas articulated by bell hooks have resonated widely. Of these, my reflection focuses on her contributions to three concepts that have been influential in social justice movements:

Intersecting structures of power

• Practising love, a verb, is a pathway to justice

Teaching/learning as activism

To help contextualise the broader impact of these and other ideas within bell hooks’ 40+ books and other writings, I’ve included a selection of additional resources, sorted by type:

Resource collections featuring bell hooks

Presentations, interviews, & conversations, additional references.

But first, a sample of memorials to honour the range and depth of appreciation for bell hooks’ contributions to social justice movements:

• Tributes flow for ‘giant, no nonsense’ feminist author, educator, activist and poet bell hooks, ABC News (Australia), 2021
• Remembering bell hooks & Her Critique of “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy” video report by Democracy Now , 2021
• We’ll Never Be Done Learning From bell hooks , article for The Cut by Bindu Bansinath, 2021
• For bell hooks, beloved scholar , remembrance article for the Gay City News by Nicholas Boston, 2021
• Memorial notice for bell hooks in the Daily Nous , 2021
• bell hooks passes, leaving legacy of activism and progress , article for ArtCritque by Brandon Lorimer, 2021
• The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks , article in The New Yorker by Hua Hsu, 2021
• What bell hooks taught us , the Giro , 2021
• bell hooks, We Will Always Rage On With You , article for Truthout by George Yancy, 2021
• In case it helps – bell hooks asé , blog post by adrianne maree brown, 2021

Exploring bell hooks’ contributions to three social justice concepts

bell hooks often wrote about how race, class, capitalism, and gender function together as interdependent power-structures. This included developing an influential analysis of how these interlocking power structures converge to produce and perpetuate the dominance of imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-heteropatriarchy .

Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle. – Love as the Practice of Freedom , in Outlaw Culture , 1994

As part of this approach, bell hooks challenged assumptions within second-wave feminism (~1960s – 1980s) that focused on patriarchy as isolated from, or as a foundation for, other forms of oppression. In doing so, she helped create space to explore the challenges of navigating power structures that are relational depending on where we are each located within the dynamic matrix of class, race, and gender.

Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility. Feminist revolution alone will not create such a world; we need to end racism, class elitism, imperialism. – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , 2000

This approach was influential, with many of the ideas she articulated further developed by those examining, and agitating against, interdependent oppressive structures – debates that paved the way for intersectional feminism . For instance, bell hooks frequently detailed examples of overlapping identities uniquely impacted by multiple systems of oppression in ways that resemble the concept of intersectionality as articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw .

Meanwhile, bell hooks also drew attention to the historical contingencies of instances of oppressive structures in specific local situations. This approach highlights our collective responsibility for challenging the interconnected structures of power these local instances each perpetuate. Building on bell hooks ideas offers avenues for accepting this responsibility and helping to build new pathways forward.

For examples of bell hooks writings that explore these interconnected structures of power, see:

• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , 1981 (2nd edition, 2015 )
• Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , 1984 (2nd edition, 2000 ; 3rd edition, 2014 )
• Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , 1989 (2nd edition, 2015 )
• Where We Stand: Class Matters , 2000
• Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice , 2013

For additional reflections on this aspect of bell hooks’ contributions, see:

• How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks , an interview by Randy Lowens, 2009; re-published in 2019 for Black Rose – Anarchist Federation
• How bell hooks Paved the Way for Intersectional Feminism , article for them by Elyssa Goodman, 2019

Practising love, as a verb, is a pathway to justice

bell hooks also helped to articulate the notion of love as a verb — a concept that shifts attention away from love as an abstract sentiment and onto the concrete manifestation of will demonstrated by intentional actions (such as care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust).

For bell hooks, love is an act of a transformative labour that offers an important pathway for communities surviving and challenging the imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-heteropatriarchy systems of oppression.

Acknowledging the truth of our reality, both individual and collective, is a necessary stage for personal and political growth. This is usually the most painful stage in the process of learning to love. – Love as the Practice of Freedom , in Outlaw Culture , 1994

This approach presents love as an act of communion with the world rather than between individuals alone. Drawing inspiration from Martin Luther King and others, bell hooks rejected the comodification of love as the passive indulgences of isolated romances.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. – All About Love: New Visions , 1999

Building on this, bell hooks helped to articulate how the work of cultivating love can be transformative for both individuals and communities. With this insistent theorising of love, bell hooks helped resist the dismissal of love as ‘too soft’ a topic for serious scholars – opening up space to examine the central role of love in almost every political question.

bell hooks exploration of the transformative power of love for communities has been particularly influential within social justice movements. For instance, her ideas are frequently referenced within activist resource lists, such as in efforts to develop transformative justice practices and community-led design .

For examples of bell hooks explorations of the concept of love as a verb, see:

• Sisters of the Yam 1993
• Love as the Practice of Freedom – in Outlaw Culture , 1994 ; (2nd edition, 2006 )
• Homemade Love – one of bell hooks’ children books, illustrated by Shane W Evans, 2017
• All About Love 2000
• Salvation: Black People and Love , 2001

For some additional reflections on bell hooks’ account of love as a pathway to justice, see:

• How bell hooks Theorised Love , article on Live Wire by Stuti Roy 2021
• Loving Ourselves Free: Radical Acceptance in bell hooks’ ‘All About Love: New Visions’ , article for Arts Help by Shakeelah Ismail, 2021

According to bell hooks, teaching should be an engaged practice that empowers critical thinking and enhances community connection.

Viewed in this way, teaching and learning become revolutionary acts that position classrooms as sites of mutual participation that cultivates joyful transformations (for students and teachers alike).

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. – Teaching to Transgress , 1994

While initially focusing on tertiary education, bell hooks’ explorations of the activist potential of teaching practices extended to all educational activities – not just those occurring within educational institutions, but also teaching/learning within our communities more broadly. Combined with her ideas on love as a pathway to justice, this view positions teaching/learning an important way of contributing to our collective liberation from intersecting oppressive systems.

Along with others, such as Paolo Freire, Frantz Fanon, and Audre Lorde, bell hooks’ ideas about the transformative potential of engaged teaching helped to establish the field of radical pedagogy – which, in turn, contributed to respectfully engaged teaching practices, variously known as participatory teaching, active learning, progressive education , etc.

Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo. – Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope , 2003

The following books offer some of bell hook’s explorations into the details of how and why the practice of teaching can, and should , be treated as a form of activism.

• Theory as Liberatory Practice , 1991
• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , 1994
• Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope , 2003
• Teaching Critical Thinking , 2009

For some further reflections on bell hooks’ ideas about teaching, see:

• Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and Practice In and Outside the Classroom – video recording of a lecture by Imani Perry, followed by a discussion with bell hooks, Karlyn Crowley, Zillah Eisenstein, and Shannon Winnubst, 2014
• To bell hooks & not being happy till we are all free , reflection by Folúkẹ́ Adébísí, 2021

Contextualising bell hooks’ contributions

• A list of bell hooks’ books, by Shippenburg University Library, 1981 – 2021
• The catalogue of bell hook’s 13 appearances on the C-SPAN network , 1995 – 2005
• IMBD – bell hooks , list of appearances and credits for documentaries, 1994 – 2017
• A play list of the 22 videos collected from bell hooks’ lectures and conversations at The New School, New York City , 2013 – 2015
• Nothing Never Happens: A Radical Pedagogy Podcast – bell hooks archive , 2017 – 2018
• List of article authored by bell hooks for the Buddhist publication Lion’s Roar , 1998 – 2021
• bell hooks – tagged writings in the adrianne maree brown’s blog , 2014-2021
• To Read bell hooks Was to Love Her , a Vulture Media Network reading list by Tao Leigh Goffe, 2021
• Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers – bell hooks , by Shippenburg University Library, 2021
• Black History Month Library
• Video recording of an interview for the release of All About Love: New Visions by John Seigenthaler, broadcast by Word on Words, 1990
• Tender Hooks — Author bell hooks wonders what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding , interview by Lisa Jervis at Bitch Media, 2000; re-published in 2021 as Remembering bell hooks in Her Own Words
• A Conversation with bell hooks , video recording of the 2004-05 Danz Lecture Series by University of Washington. This talk focuses on concepts of ‘family values’, heterosexism, and the distinction between patriarchal masculinity and masculinity; talk includes bell hooks reading two of her children’s books and is followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
• Challenging Capitalism & Patriarchy , an interview with bell hooks by Third World Viewpoint, 2007
• bell hooks in dialogue with john a. powell , a video recording of the keynote event for the Othering & Belonging Conference, 2015
• Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh , 2017
• Archive of bell hooks’ Papers , held at Berea College, including correspondence, writings, academic work, and video recordings
• Encyclopaedia of feminist icons: The Essential bell hooks , introductory article by Stephanie Newman published on the blog Writing on Glass
• Big Thinker: bell hooks ,  article for the Ethics Center by Kate Prendergast, 2019
• bell hooks speaks up , article in The Sandspur (Vol 112 Issue 17, pp.1-2) quoting bell hooks, by Heather Williams, 2013
• Critical Perspectives on Bell Hooks , collection of academic articles edited by George Yancy, and Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, 2009
• The Teaching Philosophy of Bell Hooks: The Classroom as a Site for Passionate Interrogation , academic text by K.O. Lanier, 2001

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• Intersectionality
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• Author: Commons Volunteer Librarian , E. T. Smith
• Location: Australia / Wurundjeri Country
• Release Date: 2022

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Where to Start with bell hooks

"bell hooks"  by  Kevin Andre Elliott  is licensed under 

For nearly 50 years, bell hooks was an influential thinker, theorist, and cultural critic. Her first major work,  Ain't I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism , was written while she was still an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Her work addresses diverse issues: race, class, gender, and the intersections thereof; systemic oppression and subjugation and the ways in which education can both perpetuate and defy them. It is both impassioned and scholarly. hooks embraces a colloquial style of writing which draws from various oral traditions. She prefered that her name be in all lowercase letters because what is most important is the "substance of books, not who I am” ( The Sandspur  paper, Rollins College).

Her work has embodied intersectionality for much longer than it has been a buzzword, and in fact, her works have helped folks understand what it means. 

Here are a few books that offer a snapshot of hooks as a lover, a writer, a teacher, a thinker, a gender theorist, and a critic.

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Presenting radical new ways to think about love, the acclaimed cultural critic, feminist, and author examines the role of love in our personal and professional lives and how it can be used to end struggles between individuals, communities, and societies.

A favorite personal moment was when I was reading this book in an airport, and I looked across the aisle at the gate, only to see someone else reading the same red copy of the book. This one has hit the mainstream, without a doubt.

Wounds of Passion

An intelligent, emotional glimpse into the author's transition into womanhood describes leaving Kentucky to pursue her dreams at Stanford and becoming a successful writer, and details her involvement with feminism, the publication of her first book, and other personal events.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

This book shaped a new generation of educators. Hooks teaches students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom, which is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. She speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings.

Feminism Is For Everybody

A short, accessible primer. What is feminism? hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

In this book, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

In a thought-provoking social and cultural analysis, hooks explores the world of masculinity and maleness to address some of men's most common concerns, including a fear of intimacy and the loss of their patriarchal place in society. She argues that an emotionally rewarding inner life holds the key to successful intimate relationships.

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

In this book, hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

“Talking Back”: Teaching Feminist Writing with bell hooks

In the Fall of 2012, I found myself teaching bell hooks’s “talking back,” an essay from  Talking Back  (1989), to a class of upper-middle-class (mostly white) undergraduate students. In the piece, hooks writes about reclaiming her voice as a Black girl child in a working-class Black family in the southern United States. For hooks, “[t]o speak… when one was not spoken to was a courageous act—an act of risk and daring.” She clarifies that this “courageous act” was only applicable in the case of girl children like herself, as Black boys were “encouraged” to speak as they could find a calling in preaching at the church. Black girls were encouraged towards silence unless in the company of other Black women, where Black men were absent. 

I intuitively knew what hooks meant. As a racialized girl child, who spent her pre-teen and teenage years in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, my father often asked me to subdue my voice as a writer. As a ten-year-old, when I created a Santa Claus alter ego—Suntu Clays, I called him—and my English teacher, a Goan woman, Mrs. Fernandes, encouraged “such creativity,” my father felt my unfettered writing could get me into trouble. What kind of trouble exactly was always unclear, and yet, the fear of “trouble” would always steer me away from writing anything controversial, even if it was a harmless, punny character like Suntu.

But in October of 2012, teaching hooks was a first for me, a graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I hadn’t encountered hooks before my twenties except in passing, not even during my four undergraduate years as an English student at York University, a liberal arts institution, in Toronto. Standing in that basement classroom, with bits of sunlight filtering through slats that passed for windows above my head, I squinted in the poorly lit room trying to figure out how to distill the seemingly accessible writing of a Black working-class queer feminist for a classroom of mostly white, mostly privileged students; students who had taken the “Introduction to Gender Studies” class as a mandatory elective. How do you communicate the voicelessness hooks writes about in “talking back” to students for whom that voicelessness was outside of their lived experience? How should I convey what I as a racialized queer woman intuitively understood? I didn’t know back then. As I rattled off hooks’s context and her quotes, I found blank stares meeting my animated face.

I would find myself reaching for hooks again when I taught my first proper class in the Fall of 2019, as a PhD candidate in English. It was a second-year undergraduate English class, “Contemporary Women’s Writing,” and I had carefully put together the syllabus. One week, we deep dived into Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). I explained to the class that when Spivak tried to find an example of the subaltern, she was specifically referring to the Black working-class woman in America; a figure not unlike the women hooks grew up with before she found her voice as a writer. 

hooks undoes Spivak. According to Spivak, the Black American working-class woman has no voice, and as a descendent of slavery, no history. Yet, the women who gave hooks her voice were the same Black working-class women whose “language so rich, so poetic, that it felt… like being shut off from life, smothered to death if one were not allowed to participate.” When my father told me to stop being controversial, I tried to hold myself back. But like hooks, it was the voices of three generations of women—my great grandmother, grandmother, and mother—in the same space, absent of men, exchanging sassy gossip in the darkened rooms of Calcutta monsoon afternoons, speaking rapidly in Dhakai Bangla, that I leaned into the familiar sounds I couldn’t participate in. While their dialect of comfort kept me from joining their conversations, I desperately wanted to be a part of their world by being in the same space, even if it was just as a spectator who half understood what was being said.

As I spoke of hooks in 2019, I saw the knowing in the room full of mostly women and non-binary students, many racialized. After our discussion on “Bloodchild,” an intricately timeless story borne of the genius of another Black woman writing around the same time, they knew what I meant. They intuitively understood the precarious position of a racialized girl child who could talk, but not “talk back,” who could write secretly but was mocked when found out by her other female siblings or other women, and a woman whose book  Ain’t I a Woman?  (1981) received harsh criticism from many who attempted to silence her forever. But it isn’t easy to silence one who finds joy in the very act of speaking. In hooks’s case, her joy lay in the “intensity and intimacy” between her mother and her mother’s mother, sisters, and women friends. hooks describes this “intensity and intimacy” as “loud talk, angry words, women with tongues quick and sharp, tender sweet tongues;” speech that became hooks’s reason to make speech her “birthright.”

Even such a birthright comes at a cost. Despite the joy that lies in temporary spaces absent of men, there is punishment for those who speak when their voice is not meant to be heard, or heard only when spoken to, or heard in very specific contexts. For when hooks spoke before she found her voice, she was often punished by her parents; they “often spoke about the necessity of breaking [her] spirit” and they reconceptualised her speech as madness in a world where “mad women” were often institutionalized. When I put together the syllabus of voices for my class, I deliberately chose those voices that fought against this breaking of spirit and thrived despite being silenced both within and without fraught, secret spaces: Vivek Shraya, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Cherie Dimaline, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. hooks became the basis of these other feminist women’s voices in my fall term class.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks took up a pseudonym to create a “writer-identity that would challenge and subdue all impulses” rooted in the patriarchal need to silence women’s voices. Her untimely passing leaves behind a rich body of words and ideas that still hold true for the racialized female writer. And as racialized feminist women, it is up to us to use that wisdom to make speech our birthright not only on the page, but also the classroom and in conversation, with or without men. 

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10 Powerful bell hooks Works on the Intersectionality of Race and Feminism

The iconic writer passed away on December 15, 2021 at age 69.

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After receiving her bachelor’s at Stanford and going on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, hooks brought her unyielding and honest perspective to the world of feminist literature. From her debut, Ain't I a Woman , to the celebrated All About Love , hooks’s goal was always to enlighten. Perhaps one of her most apt quotes was this one, from 1999’s Remembered Rapture : “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.”

A native of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks taught at Berea College for over 15 years. She was also the founder of the bell hooks Institute , which “celebrates, honors, and documents the life and work” of its namesake. Check out these ten books by the legendary author.

The Will to Change (2004)

In this acclaimed work, hooks speaks to men of all ages, ethnicities, and sexual identities to address their pressing questions about love and masculinity.

Communion (2002)

Communion serves as a heartfelt address to women, guiding them to search for and choose love as a way to set out on the path to ultimate freedom.

All About Love (2000)

In what is arguably hooks's most popular work, the scholar seeks to clarify the true definition of love in our society. Here she makes the argument that only love can heal social divisions and enable us to come together as a true community.

Feminism Is for Everybody (2000)

In this brief but compelling work, hooks makes the case that feminism is a value all should embrace. She acknowledges that initially the movement was insular, and critiques the forces that made it so, while introducing how communities can utilize feminism's precepts to move forward.

Where We Stand (2000)

In this unflinching meditation, hooks returns to her roots to analyze the intersectionality of class and race and how society can break free of systemic boundaries.

Bone Black (1996)

As a memoir, Bone Black is a revealing look into hooks's life, exploring her journey to womanhood and through her career as a writer in an unequal society.

Killing Rage (1995)

Written from the perspective of feminists and Black Americans, Killing Rage is a book of 23 essays that address the reality of systemic racism in the United States.

Teaching to Transgress (1994)

Here, Hooks proposes that all teachers should strive to encourage their students to reject gender, race, and class divides.

Feminist Theory (1984)

Considered radical when it was first published in 1984, hooks's Feminist Theory boldly critiqued the lack of intersectionality in the feminist movement, providing a blueprint for unity in the fight for gender equality.

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

This classic 1981 work of feminist scholarship remains essential for an understanding of what it is to be a Black woman in America.

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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• Volume 52 Issue 13

bell hooks: A voice of love, activism, and intersectionality

• by Victoria A. Brownworth, Special to the SGN
• Friday October 28, 2022

When bell hooks died on December 15, 2021, it was a gut punch. There was no time when her extraordinary writing and feminist and Lesbian theorizing was not part of the Queer community. There was no time when the community imagined that hooks' voice would not always be in the forefront of our collective consciousness on intersectionality and Queer theory and praxis. Intersectionality has become a political and cultural buzzword recently, yet few have read the intersectional essays of hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, who invented that concept and wrote (and continues to write) about it exhaustively and, as Audre Lorde would say, deliberately. Intersectionality describes and explores how race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class might intersect with one another and overlap. The extraordinary breadth of hooks' writing and the thematic structures of her books, essays, and poetry all build on each other. She wrote so much of love, so compellingly of emotional and romantic commitment and what it means, that it was stunning when hooks revealed she spent the last two decades of her life unpartnered and celibate. In an interview for Shondaland in 2017, hooks (who lowercased her name) told Abigail Bereola, "I don't have a partner. I've been celibate for 17 years. I would love to have a partner, but I don't think my life is less meaningful. I always tell people my life is a pie, and there's a slice of the pie that's missing, but there's so much pie left over — do I really want to spend my time looking at that empty piece and judging myself by that?" In that same interview, hooks delved deeply into one of her pivotal topics: self-love and what it means for women to love themselves and recognize that they are worthy of commitment and that they do not deserve violence or other oppressive acts in a relationship. As hooks told Essence magazine in another interview, "I think the revolution needs to be one of self-esteem, because I feel we are all assaulted on all sides... I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously." In the era of white/MAGA/GOP grievance, the fear of losing the prioritization of whiteness and cis-het maleness has subsumed much of our political discourse, which makes hooks' work more crucial than ever and her recent death all the more painful a loss. Centering Black women Born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, hooks began using her maternal great-grandmother's name as her pen name in 1976. She lowercased her name to signify that she wanted people to focus on her books, not "who I am," as she explained in a talk at Rollins College in 2013. Over the four decades of her writing, hooks wrote continually about Black women, feminism, the oppressive nature of patriarchy, and how Black men had embraced that even as they decried white imperialism. In her 1981 feminist classic, "Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism," hooks deconstructed a panoply of issues from slavery to the devaluation of Black women and Black womanhood. She wrote declaratively that "no other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have Black women... When Black people are talked about, the focus tends to be on Black men; and when women are talked about, the focus tends to be on white women." She wrote, "A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years." Later, in "Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work," hooks expanded that discourse, noting, "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." Prescient ideas and theories True to her advice, hooks was always writing more and building on her previous ideas and theories. There is no disengaging of historical and cultural events in her work. She sees everything through a prism of contexts that each impact each other — hence the violence of nationalism cannot be divorced from domestic violence. She could see these links so clearly and write about them with such clarity, precision, and accessibility, that the reader was left convinced and educated. In a 1995 conversation with digital activist and lyricist John Perry Barlow, hooks said, "I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism." We are in that time now, where the MAGA GOP has combined fundamentalism and nationalism and added a soupçon of xenophobia. The prescience of hooks' readings of the zeitgeist and the moment was a critical aspect of her oeuvre as a writer and theorist. Queer-pas-gay This was true even of her own identity. Though many people referred to hooks as a Lesbian or Gay, she preferred Queer. In describing herself as "queer-pas-gay," hooks inserted the French word for not — pas — and said that she chose that term because being Queer is "not who you're having sex with but about being at odds with everything around it." In an event on May 6, 2014, titled, "a conversation with bell hooks," the then-scholar-in-residence at Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at the New School spoke at length about this issue. She said, "As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean's [the British queer theorist] work on being queer and queer not as being about who you're having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it, and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." Background The details of hooks' life helped build her perspective and her feminist and Queer theory. She was born and died in Kentucky and often wrote about living in Appalachia (a region often associated with whiteness), but she lived most of her adult life elsewhere. She had several degrees: a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also worked across the country as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; San Francisco State University; Yale; Oberlin College; and the City College of New York. Among the issues hooks wrote about in her books was the confluence of health, mental well-being, and racism. True to another of her sayings — "I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance" — hooks published prolifically: over 30 books and dozens of chapters and essays in books by others. Her publications included the iconic Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), All About Love: New Visions (2000), Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics (2000), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005), and Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (2013). She also wrote several children's books, including Homemade Love (2002). In the last decade of her life, struggling with the renal disease that ultimately killed her, she moved back to Kentucky. On her return to her birthplace, hooks compared her journey to that of author Wendell Berry. "Our trajectories are very similar," hooks told PBS, "because he went out to California, New York, the places that I too went, and then felt that urge, that call to home, that it's time to come back." There are so many things to be said about hooks' life and work, so many visionary concepts she developed and nurtured and expanded upon. But at her core, she was always writing a paean to love. She wanted love to equilibrate the world, to mitigate violence, to assuage the pain of racism, misogyny, homophobia, classism. In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations , hooks wrote, "The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others." Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize—nominated, award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, and Curve, among other publications. She is the Bay Area Reporter 's television columnist. She was among the OUT 100 and is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the Lambda Award—winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic, Ordinary Mayhem: A Novel , and Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life. This article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News. Reprinted with permission through the SGN 's partnership with the National LGBT Media Association.

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The Best of bell hooks: Life, Writings, Quotes, and Books

Renowned author, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks passed away on Dec. 15 at the age of 69. Read about her remarkable life and and work, alongside a selection of pieces by and conversations with hooks published in the pages of Lion’s Roar.

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When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us. —bell hooks

Writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks has played a vital role in twenty-first-century activism. Her expansive life’s work of writing and lecturing has explored the historical function of race and gender in America.

hooks’ writing is deeply personal and educational, drawing on her own painful experiences of racism and sexism in an effort to educate us on how to combat them. hooks also plays a part in the Buddhist community, drawing inspiration from Buddhist practice in her life and her work. Her conversations with a number of important Buddhist leaders have been published on Lion’s Roar , along with her reflections on spirituality, race, feminism, and life.

Read on to learn more about bell hooks’ life and work, and to read some favorite pieces by and conversations with her.

The life of bell hooks

Early life and education.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in the fall of 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a family of seven children. As a child, she enjoyed writing poetry, and developed a reverence for nature in the Kentucky hills, a landscape she has called a place of “magic and possibility.” Growing up in the south during the 1950s, hooks began her education in racially segregated schools. When schools in the south became desegregated in the 1960s, hooks faced painful challenges among a predominantly white staff and student population. These would inspire and shape her life’s work fighting sexism and racism to come.

After graduating high school, hooks studied at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. in English in 1973. It was at Stanford, in her Women’s Studies classes, that hooks began to notice a significant absence of black women from feminist literature. She began the writing of her book Ain’t I A Woman during her English studies, and also worked as a telephone operator. In 1976, she earned her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later received her doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

Writing and Career

In 1976, hooks began teaching as an English professor and lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During this time, she published a book of poems,  And There We Wept , under the pen name “bell hooks” — her great-grandmother’s name, and a woman who, hooks has said, was known for speaking her mind. hooks chose not to capitalize any letters in her first and last name to emphasize focus on her message, and not herself or her identity.

hooks went on to teach at several post-secondary institutions, and in 1981, published Ain’t I A Woman , which examined the history of black women’s involvement in feminism, focusing on the nature of black womanhood, the civil rights movement, and the historical impact of sexism towards Black women during slavery. Ain’t I A Woman went on to gain worldwide recognition as an important contribution to the feminist movement, and is still a popular work studied in many academic courses.

To date, hooks has published more than thirty books, including four children’s books, exploring topics of gender, race, class, spirituality, and their various intersections. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute , in Berea, Kentucky, which celebrates and documents her life and work, and aims to “bring together academics with local community members to study, learn, and engage in critical dialogue.” Visitors to the Institute are able to explore artifacts, images, and manuscripts written and talked about in her work.

Today, hooks continues to write and lecture to an ever-growing audience. In recent years, she has undertaken three scholar-in-residences at The New School in New York City, where she has engaged in pubic dialogues with other influential figures such as Gloria Steinem and Laurie Anderson. Last year, hooks sat down with actress Emma Watson for an inspiring conversation on feminism for Paper Magazine .

bell hooks and Buddhism

bell hooks was exposed to Buddhism due to her love and exploration of Beat poetry — most notably Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. At the age of 18, she met Snyder, a Zen practitioner, who invited her to the Ring of Bone Zendo in Nevada City, California, for a May Day celebration. She has engaged in various forms of what she calls a “Buddhist Christian practice” ever since.

hooks speaks and writes of her spirituality often, and has met in conversation with many influential Buddhist teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh , Pema Chödrön , and Sharon Salzberg . In a 2015 interview with The New York Times , philosopher George Yancy asked hooks “How are your Buddhist practices and your feminist practices mutually reinforcing?” She responded:

Well, I would have to say my Buddhist Christian practice challenges me, as does feminism. Buddhism continues to inspire me because there is such an emphasis on practice. What are you doing? Right livelihood, right action. We are back to that self-interrogation that is so crucial. It’s funny that you would link Buddhism and feminism, because I think one of the things that I’m grappling with at this stage of my life is how much of the core grounding in ethical-spiritual values has been the solid ground on which I stood. That ground is from both Buddhism and Christianity, and then feminism that helped me as a young woman to find and appreciate that ground…

Feminism does not ground me. It is the discipline that comes from spiritual practice that is the foundation of my life. If we talk about what a disciplined writer I have been and hope to continue to be, that discipline starts with a spiritual practice. It’s just every day, every day, every day.

bell hooks in Conversation

Strike! Rise! Dance! – bell hooks & Eve Ensler

“Where does the trust come between dominator and dominated? Between those who have privilege and those who don’t have privilege? Trust is part of what humanizes the dehumanizing relationship, because trust grows and takes place in the context of mutuality. How do we get that when we have profound differences and separations?”

Eve Ensler and bell hooks discuss fighting domination and finding love.

Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh

“In our own Buddhist sangha, community is the core of everything. The sangha is a community where there should be harmony and peace and understanding. That is something created by our daily life together. If love is there in the community, if we’ve been nourished by the harmony in the community, then we will never move away from love.”

bell hooks meets with Thich Nhat Hanh to ask him the question “How do we build a community of love?”

Pema Chödrön & bell hooks on cultivating openness when life falls apart

“The source of all wakefulness, the source of all kindness and compassion, the source of all wisdom, is in each second of time. Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.”

In this conversation from 1997, bell hooks talks to Pema Chödrön about how to open your heart to life’s most difficult challenges.

“There’s No Place to Go But Up” — bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation

“In my work I constantly say, this is how I fell and this is how I was able to rise. It may be important that you fall. Life is not over. Just don’t let defeat defeat you. See where you are, and then forgive yourself, and get up.”

A classic 1998 conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks, moderated by Lion’s Roar editor-in-chief Melvin McLeod.

bell hooks on Sex, Love, and Feminism

Toward a worldwide culture of love.

“Imagine all that would change for the better if every community in our nation had a center (a sangha) that would focus on the practice of love, of loving-kindness.”

The practice of love, says bell hooks, is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. She traces her thirty-year meditation on love, power, and Buddhism, and concludes it is only love that transforms our personal relationships and heals the wounds of oppression.

Ain’t She Still a Woman?

“It is easier for mainstream society to support the idea of benevolent black male domination in family life than to support the cultural revolutions that would ensure an end to race, gender and class exploitation.”

Increasingly, patriarchy is offered as the solution to the crisis black people face. Black women face a culture where practically everyone wants us to stay in our place.

When Men Were Men

“On one hand it’s amazing how much sexist thinking has been challenged and has changed. And it’s equally troubling that with all these revolutions in thought and action, patriarchal thinking remains intact.”

The message is, says bell hooks, that it’s fine for women to stray from sexist roles and play around with life on the other side, as long as we come back to our senses and stay happily-ever-after in our place.

Penis Passion

“When we finally gave ourselves permission to say whatever we wanted to say about the male body—about male sexuality—we were either silent or merely echoed narratives that were already in place.

bell hooks argues that our erotic lives are enhanced when men and women can celebrate the penis in ways that don’t uphold macho stereotypes.

bell hooks on Life and Faith

Voices and visions.

“When the spirit moves into writing, shaping its direction, that is a moment of pure mystery. It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will.”

bell hooks on the mystery of what calls her to write.

A Beacon of Light: bell hooks on Thich Nhat Hanh

“When I think of Thay now, I am amazed by his awesome gentleness of spirit. Through the years, it’s always been clear that he’s a teacher of tremendous integrity; there has been constant congruence between what he thinks, says, and does.”

The leading cultural critic and thinker bell hooks shares what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh means to people of color.

When the Spirit Moves You

““Everywhere I turned in nature I could see and feel the mystery — the wonder of that which could not be accounted for by human reason.”

bell hooks shares her experiences of encountering the divine in nature and the written word.

Design: A Happening Life

“When life is happening, design has meaning, and every design we encounter strengthens our recognition of the value of being alive, of being able to experience joy and peace.”

bell hooks Quotes

Living simply makes loving simple..

There is no change without contemplation. The whole image of Buddha under the Bodhi tree says here is an action taking place that may not appear to be a meaningful action.

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. in the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. this is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong., it’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. past the ego., books by bell hooks, in the temple of love: the female buddha.

bad baby bell books In the Temple of Love is a collection of poetry by bell hooks. hooks draws on Buddhist themes of compassion, and puts a particular focus on the female bodhisttva, Tara on the 30 poems in this collection.

Belonging: A Culture of Place

“What does it mean to call a place home? How do we create community? When can we say that we truly belong?” asks bell hooks in Belonging . This book follows hooks’ life journey, and what she learned moving from place to place, from country to city, and finally landing back home in Kentucky. hooks explores the “geography of the heart,” touching on issues of race, gender, class, and the roles they play in our sense of community and belonging. hooks takes the reader back to her childhood in the Kentucky hills, where she first developed a deep love of nature, and shows the important role geography can play in developing our spiritual connections and worldviews.

All About Love: New Visions

Harper Perennial

In All About Love , hooks draws from personal experience, and explores the concept and meaning of love through a psychological and philosophical view. She looks closely at the difference between love as a noun, and a verb, examining the flawed idea of love society has created. Drawing on her own childhood and life’s experience, as well as words from influential figures throughout history, hooks investigates the question “What is love?” She unpacks the meaning of love in modern American life, urging us to let go of our obsessions with power and domination in order to truly awaken to love.

Salvation: Black People and Love

Here, hooks looks at love in African American communities, urging that we see love as a force for change. She looks at love through both a religious and social lens, again drawing on personal experience, and reflecting on the messages on love displayed in literature, film, and music. hooks also explores cultivating self-love as an African American woman as well as learning to love black masculinity, and embracing heterosexual love. When it comes to seeking justice, and healing historical and modern wounds in the world, and African American communities, “Love,” hooks concludes, “is our hope and salvation.”

The Will to Change: Men, masculinity, and love

In The Will to Change , bell hooks explores men’s most intimate questions about love, exploring the skewed way patriarchal society has taught men to know love, and know themselves. Though well-known for her feminist thinking, hooks works to include men in the discussion, as she believes men must be involved in feminist resistance. The Will to Change offers a feminist focus on men, doing away with radical feminist labeling of “all men as oppressors and all women as victims.” Many men, says hooks, are afraid to change, and have not been taught how to be in touch with their own feelings — The Will to Change offers a deeply intelligent roadmap to doing just that.

Lion’s Roar

Remembering bell hooks and her enormous legacy

Amna Nawaz Amna Nawaz

Lena I. Jackson Lena I. Jackson

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/remembering-bell-hooks-and-her-enormous-legacy

The influential critic, author and feminist bell hooks died Wednesday at the age of 69. She was at home, surrounded by friends and family. Amna Nawaz looks at her work and legacy.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

The influential critic, author and feminist bell hooks died today at the age of 69. She was at home surrounded by friends and family.

Amna Nawaz is back with a look at her work and her legacy.

Amna Nawaz:

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks grew up in segregated Kentucky in the 1950s and '60s. The daughter of a janitor and a maid, hooks left home to attend Stanford University, where she earned an English degree. She went on to earn a Ph.D. and then authored more than 30 works under her pen name, which is taken from her great-grandmother.

Her prolific writing spanned poetry, essays, and children's books, examining the intersection of race, politics, and gender, and making her one of the most influential Black feminist scholars of the last half-century.

In 2004, hooks returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College and later founded the bell hooks Institute there.

Here to talk more about her life and impact is Imani Perry. She's the Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

And, Professor Perry, welcome to the "NewsHour." Thank you for making the time.

Imani Perry, Princeton University:

Thank you for having me.

You reacted to the passing of bell hooks on Twitter by sharing this thought.

"For exactly 30 years, she was not only an intellectual influence, but a presence in my life."

Professor Perry, tell us about the impact that bell hooks had on you.

Imani Perry:

Well, I met her when I was 19 years old. I was an intern at South End Press, where she published much of her work.

And she was a teacher to her core, even though I didn't have her in the classroom. She brought ideas alive. She is a person who bridged the space between high critical theory, European scholars and intellectuals, Marxist thinkers, and everyday life. And she wrote and spoke in a way to make all of that theory applicable to our daily lives.

And, also, she wanted it to bear upon the way we thought of each other ethically, our relationships, our personal stories. So, she was both an intellectual and she was also a kind of — I don't know, a curate, like a person who tended to soles as an educator.

And so to be brought under her wing as a teenager was incredibly influential. It allowed me to imagine how to live a life of the mind, but also how to pursue right relation to other human beings in my midst.

So, as we mentioned, she was born Gloria Jean Watkins.

She took the pen name bell hooks, which was her great-grandmother's name.

What do we know about why did she take that name and why all lowercase when she used it?

Yes. She was — it was consistent of leftist organizers of the era to think of one — the individual in the lowercase, that one spoke in the collective, right?

So, her name was both an homage to her great-grandmother and the women who came before, but also with a kind of humility to choose the lower case. And she was very much — I mean, she traveled the world. She had a massive influence. She was a Southern country woman to her core.

And she never lost touch with that. It was — and so there was a kind of intimacy with that identity that she held on to through her pen name, as it were, but I always called her Gloria.

And she mentioned those Southern roots, growing up at the intersection of racism and sexism.

She actually spoke about it in this 2016 talk at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. Take a listen to what she said.

bell hooks, Author:

I think that many of us as females find sexism so normalized, whereas people of color, Black, brown, whatever, when we hear a racist joke or racism spoken not as a joke, we really feel assaulted on our sensibilities, but sexism is such woven into the fabric of our daily lives that I think it's harder for people to resist.

Professor Perry, how did that lived experience show up in her work?

Well, she told a lot of stories from her own life.

She in many ways was an open book. She allowed herself to be vulnerable. And she contemplated. So, the way that she engaged with people — and she was outspoken, and she could be really challenging — was to open that up that — those — to explore those questions of internalized sexism, internalized classism. How do we love each other?

I mean, those — so that kind of exploration was — I mean, that was consistent with who she was. And, for me, it allowed me to think all of the sort of academic things I was pursuing, they boiled down at — to the very core about how we are going to live and how we're going to coexist on this planet, right? I mean, that's who she was.

It has been four decades since her first full-length book, "Ain't I a Woman?" was published.

And you have to note that a lot of the ideas she brought up back then about Black women and feminism and white feminism and the intersection of race and sex and all these things, we're still talking about those things and grappling with them today.

What do you think the legacy of those ideas that she raised four decades ago is today?

Well, I think her legacy is enormous.

And part of this incredible body of work that she created, the legacy that is found is, there's so many young people, the first time they start to think seriously about class, about sexuality, about gender, about identity, about vulnerability, about spirituality is through her work.

Her work has never gone out of press. That "Ain't I a Woman?" you can still purchase, right? And so the legacy is actually in all of us who have been influenced by her work, not just in academia, in every sector of society, in organizing, in nonprofit worlds, in corporate America.

And so, I mean, it really has — she has shaped several generations of thinkers and of people who are members of communities. And so I hope that, at this moment, it becomes a time for us to reflect on how much she helped us think, how much she helped us grow, right, and how she pushed the world closer to justice.

An incredible life and an enormous loss.

Professor Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University, thank you so much for joining us.

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bell hooks on How We Raise Men

Word came on Wednesday that Gloria Jean Watkins, an endlessly versatile and probing social critic who went by the pen name bell hooks, has died at the age of sixty-nine. hooks, who was raised in a segregated town in Kentucky, wrote dozens of books and was best known for her works on feminism, including “ Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism ”; “ Yearning: Race Gender, and Cultural Politics ,” and “ Killing Rage: Ending Racism .” The last time we spoke was in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair and the rise of the #MeToo movement , for a segment that first aired on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our conversation covered masculinity, patriarchy, politics, and parenting, including the dynamics within her own family. hooks was ferocious in her commitments and beliefs, but hardly doctrinaire, with a sensibility and a writing voice that always returned to the healing necessity of love. She told me:

“My father, who was a very violent, very patriarchal man, he was in the all-Black infantry in World War Two. He was a boxer. He was a basketball player. He was all of these things that we associate with masculinity, and in fact really had a lot of disdain for my brother, because actually my brother was a much softer, warmer human being. And my father looked down on that—he felt that was not masculine.” hooks continued, “I still think that, if we really want patriarchy to change, we are in trouble if we turn our backs on men and not really want to examine, Why are men so violent? [The author and educator] John Bradshaw used to say that the primary form of child abuse is really shaming. And I think that if we look at all of these men and their behavior—it’s such shaming behavior.”

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16.2 Textual Analysis Trailblazer: bell hooks

Textual analysis trailblazer: bell hooks, learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate critical thinking and communicating in varying rhetorical and cultural contexts.
• Integrate the writer’s ideas with ideas of others.

“Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix, and transform.”

Talking Back

Born Gloria Jean Watkins , bell hooks adopted the name of her great-grandmother, a woman known for speaking her mind. In choosing this pen name, hooks decided not to capitalize the first letters so that audiences would focus on her work rather than her name. However, this stylistic choice has become as memorable as her work.

She is well known for her approach to social critique through textual analysis. The writing interests and research methods hooks uses are wide ranging. They began in poetry and fiction writing and eventually developed into critical analysis. She started writing at an early age, as her teachers (in the church) impressed on hooks the power in language. With this exposure to language, hooks began to understand the “sacredness of words” and began to write poetry and fiction. Over time, hooks’s writing became more focused on advancing and reviving the texts of Black women and women of color, for even though “black women and women of color are publishing more… there is still not enough” writing by and about them. Texts live on through others’ analyses, hooks argues. Therefore, she believes the critical essay “is the most useful form for the expression” between her thoughts and the books she is reading. The critical essay allows hooks to create a dialogue, or “talk back” to the text. The critical essay also extends “the conversations I have with other critical thinkers.” It is this “talking back” that has advanced hooks’s approach to literary criticism. This action, for which hooks eventually named a volume of essays, refers to the development of a strong sense of self that allows Black women to speak out against racism and sexism.

Although young hooks continued to write poetry—some of which was published—she gained a reputation as a writer of critical essays about systems of domination. She began writing her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , when she was 19 and an undergraduate student at Stanford University . The book is titled after Sojourner Truth’s (1797–1883) “ Ain’t I a Woman ” speech given at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. In this work, hooks examines the effects of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. By “talking back” to formerly enslaved abolitionist Sojourner Truth throughout, hooks identifies ways in which feminist movements have failed to focus on Black women and women of color. This work is one of many in which thorough analysis “uncovered” the lived experiences of Black women and women of color.

Discussion Questions

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An Artist Who Turned Her Bedroom Closet Into a Safe Haven

By Gloria Oladipo July 3, 2024

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On View: An Artist Who Turned Her Bedroom Closet Into a Safe Haven

In her show at the New York gallery 52 Walker, Diamond Stingily reflects upon her upbringing in Illinois and the places she’s lived since.

I spoke to Stingily about one of the works →

The show’s title, “Orgasms Happened Here,” is pulled from a note that Stingily and her older brother found in his bedroom closet when their family moved to the suburb of Romeoville, Ill., from Chicago’s West Side.

At 52 Walker, Stingily has built a set of closets into the gallery’s walls, filling each one with found materials, such as newspaper cutouts and baseball bats, that explore “shame, sexiness, desire [and] yearning,” she says.

One installation, “Orgasms Happened Here (Hot Girl),” was inspired by the closet in Stingily’s own teenage bedroom. Back then, the artist was frustrated by her mother’s and grandmother’s strictness, she says, and her closet was a sanctuary where she could read or retreat, “a space within a space to get away.”

The prim white shirts in “Hot Girl” partially obstruct magazine images of bikini-clad women posing on cars and motorcycles. “It’s interesting to me how cars and women go hand in hand, how cars are given female names and [that’s] very objectifying,” the artist says.

While building this work, she was thinking about how such pictures shaped her sense of self as a girl and how “a lot of Black women don’t have agency over their bodies.”

Throughout the gallery, Stingily has installed stained glass windows and segments of iron fences that nod to the architectural details of Chicago and New York, her current home.

“I wanted to make a show about a lot of things, but mainly a show with duality, ” Stingily says.

Stingily is inspired by the writer bell hooks. “I’ve been reading [her memoir] ‘Bone Black’ (1996), and she talks about her childhood [without] romanticizing it,” the artist says. “ She goes within herself to reach the masses … and explores not only [her] personal life but the collective.”

Stingily aims to similarly translate her own memories in her work. Looking back now at her life in Romeoville, she says, “ I probably wouldn’t be an artist if it wasn’t for that house. Because I just wanted to do a 180 [from] what I had to do at home.”

On View highlights works by Black artists, who have traditionally faced a disproportionately uphill battle in having their work exhibited by mainstream institutions.

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bell hooks Said 'Knowing How to Be Solitary Is Central to the Art of Loving'?

The writer and theorist wrote extensively about love., nur ibrahim, published june 29, 2024.

About this rating

A purported quote about love from the acclaimed author, theorist and professor bell hooks has been going viral since 2023 . Most recently, it spread on X in June 2024, claiming she once said, "Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."

hooks — who insisted  on using lower-case letters in her name — indeed wrote this in her 2000 book, " All About Love: New Visions ." The book is a collection of essays that critiques society's view of love as primarily romantic and addresses love in numerous shapes and forms. We thus rate this claim as "Correct Attribution."

The quote can be found in Chapter 8, titled "Community: Loving Communion." The section begins with an analysis of communities and how they are essential to sustain life, more so than nuclear families, romantic partnerships or individualists. hooks wrote (emphasis ours):

We all long for loving community. It enhances life's joy. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.  

She then referenced theologian Henri Nouwen who "emphasized the value of solitude." She described his writings that discouraged readers from seeing solitude "as being about the need for privacy" but "the place where we can truly look at ourselves and shed the false self." 

She later quoted Nouwen's writings: "Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community."

hooks died in December 2021 , reportedly due to renal failure. She is widely credited for highlighting in the 1980s how the feminist movement had ignored the voices of Black and working-class women. Her interests were wide and varied and she wrote around 30 books that encompassed children's literature, literary criticism, memoir, self-help and poetry. 

hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. HarperCollins, 2018. Accessed 25 June 2024. 

Risen, Clay. "Bell Hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69." The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2021. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html. Accessed 25 June 2024.   

By Nur Ibrahim

Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a reporter with experience working in television, international news coverage, fact checking, and creative writing.

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All about Love

39 pages • 1 hour read

All about Love: Love Song to the Nation Book 1

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Key Figures

Index of Terms

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Summary and Study Guide

All About Love: New Visions (2000) is a book of essays by acclaimed American author and feminist scholar, bell hooks (hooks intentionally spelled her name with lowercase letters, which is recreated throughout this guide). hooks is best known for her feminist writings, many of which examine themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the intersections between these concepts. She first rose to literary prominence in 1981 with the publication of her first book of nonfiction, Ain’t I a Woman? , an exploration of Black womanhood in America.

hooks describes All About Love as a roadmap for readers that “tells us how to return to love” (xxix). Concerned about contemporary notions of love, hooks’s essays present “new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love’s transformative power” (xxix). Throughout the book, hooks includes anecdotes about her personal journey toward understanding and manifesting love while using the research of other scholars to support her theories. hooks remains steadfast in her belief in the power of love and, through her writing, invites readers to join her in the active, mindful pursuit of love.

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In the Preface to All About Love , hooks reflects on her complicated history with love and the overwhelming, and at times debilitating, grief caused by the lovelessness she experienced throughout both her childhood and adulthood. It was only once hooks began to heal from the trauma of her past that she was able to begin a new journey with love. hooks spent years of her life trying to recover the unconditional love she received only briefly as a child, in an effort to reclaim the sense of safety she felt as a little girl. The emotional pain hooks endured in the wake of lovelessness rendered her unable to effectively give or receive the love she needed. It was only when “that mourning ceased I was able to love again” (x).

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The book is divided into 13 essays, each closely examining a particular aspect of love and educating readers on both the complexities and pleasures of love. hooks investigates the nature of many different categories of love, such as familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and, importantly, self-love . By encouraging readers to part with traditional understandings about love—many of which are rooted in patriarchal schools of thought—hooks lays the foundation for readers to practice loving in new and more effective ways. By devising a methodology—a “love ethic”—that readers of all kinds can use as a road map on the difficult but fulfilling journey toward love, hooks demonstrates her innate belief that “everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well” (87).

Throughout the essays, hooks thoughtfully investigates the necessary elements of effective love practice, such as honesty, commitment, self-acceptance, and community. Constantly reminding readers that giving and receiving love is hard work, hooks also acknowledges the hardships of love practice, which may come in the form of fear, shame, grief, loneliness, or rejection. By addressing these hardships, hooks concedes that the decision to commit oneself to love takes courage. However daunting, these risks are necessary to take, for “as long as we are afraid of risk we cannot know love” (185).

Although the structure of the book and its citations to scholarly research make it an academic text, hooks’s use of first-person narration and her tendency to address her readers directly—often bringing the two parties in communion as “we”—allows for a warm and deeply intimate tone . This intimacy and direct invitation into hooks’s innermost thoughts, fears, and delights empowers readers to gather as a community and join her in the pursuit of love.

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Writers for Adults Write for Kids

Writing books for adults and writing books for children are two very different things. While it may seem rather asinine to say that, there are some folks out there with the mistaken apprehension that writing for children must be easier than writing for adults.  "It's shorter! You can write about silly and ridiculous things! And a picture book? * phffftttt* Child's play!" 

In actuality, most people agree that writing for children is harder than writing for adults. Children's developmental needs require that one write with humor, kindness, respect, wonder, and keep it short and to the point. Don't talk down to children, or fail to take them seriously. And if you're writing a picture book, don't forget that you are in fact working in a visual medium. 

There is a lot at stake. 

That's why it's such a treat to learn that some well-known writers of adult fiction and memoir have also given their readers picture books to enjoy. I have written about some of these authors before in this blog, including Neil Gaiman , Margaret Atwood , Toni Morrison , Junot Díaz , and bell hooks .  

But a search of the library's catalog reveals more books by more writers to discover. This year alone has seen at least three well-known authors publish books for younger readers!

In May of this year, famed Latin American author Isabel Allende published her first ever picture book. Perla the Mighty Dog is a tender look at the bond between a child and their pet and will appeal to dog lovers of all ages. 

Perla, the Mighty Dog

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Also published this year is Simone, by Pulitzer prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen . Forced to evacuate after a wildfire threatens their home, Simone learns that her mother had a similar experience as a child in Viet Nam. While at the emergency shelter, Simone turns to art to process her feelings and find community. 

Finally, 2024 saw humorist David Sedaris publish Pretty Ugly , a subversive story about a young monster that—GROSS!—becomes an adorable rosy cheeked human girl.  Illustrated by Ian Falconer, the creator of the beloved Olivia picture book series, this book is a wry commentary on what really makes a beautiful child. 

Pretty Ugly

But of course there are more books to discover in our catalog! More commonly known as the award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty, Zadie Smith is also the author of The Surprise , a delightful story about  a judo suit wearing guinea pig. 

The Surprise

The incomparable novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and critic James Baldwin also gave us Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood . Originally published in 1976 and reissued in 2018, this ode to black childhood was illustrated by visionary French artist Yoran Cazac . 

Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni has written several books for children. Drawing on her own childhood, A Library is a celebration of the power of libraries to both inform and inspire. 

While the renowned author Chinua Achebe wrote what is considered one of the most important novels of the 20 th century , he also wrote a few books for children, including How the Leopard Got His Claws . This animal fable about power, cooperation, and justice is ideal for older picture book readers. 

How the Leopard Got His Claws

For more picture books written by writers for adults, check out the catalog widget below. It includes books by Ursula K. Le Guin , Nnedi Okorafor , Carl Sandburg , and more. You just may find one of your favorite authors on the list! 

In a former life, Klem-Marí was a Religious Studies scholar. She much prefers being the Family Literacy Coordinator for Bringing Books to Life ! She wants you to read and share books with the children in your life, and for those children to see you to read as well. Originally from Puerto Rico, Klem-Marí also enjoys her cat, baking, yoga, and the works of Octavia Butler.

• Picture Books and Easy Books
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Genre / Topics

• Fiction and Literature
• Literacy and Learning
• Early Readers (K-2nd)