These would inspire and shape her life’s work fighting sexism and racism to come.Īfter graduating high school, hooks studied at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. When schools in the south became desegregated in the 1960s, hooks faced painful challenges among a predominantly white staff and student population. 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. The life of bell hooks Early Life and Educationīell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in the fall of 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a family of seven children. Read on to learn more about bell hooks’ life and work, and to read some favorite pieces by and conversations with her. 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. hooks also plays a part in the Buddhist community, drawing inspiration from Buddhist practice in her life and her work. 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. Her expansive life’s work of writing and lecturing has explored the historical function of race and gender in America. Writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks has played a vital role in twenty-first-century activism. 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.

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