Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to working-class parents Rosa Bell Watkins, a homemaker and maid, and Veodis Watkins, a janitor. hooks chose the pseudonym bell hooks in honor of her great-grandmother, and she chose to keep it lowercase to put the focus on her work instead of her identity. During her childhood and adolescence, Hopkinsville was segregated, and hooks was educated in segregated schools. hooks was an avid reader, something she recalls her parents shaming and humiliating her for during her childhood in Communion. hooks’s childhood was also marked by strife in the home, as her father was highly patriarchal, controlling, and emotionally withholding, while her mother permitted and at times even participated in hooks’s father’s degradation of hooks.

This mistreatment inspired hooks to leave home, against her father’s orders, to attend Stanford University, where she earned her BA in English in 1973 before earning her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. After years of teaching and participating in academia, hooks earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. hooks is the author of over 30 books, the first of which was a 1978 chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept, but her first major work was her 1981 nonfiction text Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism, whose title she took from Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech. Truth’s work was a large influence in hooks’s writings, in addition to the work by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, whose work hooks composed her doctoral thesis about.

hooks’s upbringing greatly impacted her understanding of love, as she explores throughout the entirety of Communion. Her father’s patriarchal mindset and beliefs made her distrustful of men, something she openly admits to in Communion. She states that if she did not have her antipatriarchal grandfather Daddy Gus in her life, she may have become “a man-hating woman or at best a woman who simply feared men” (161). Her grandfather was hooks’s only example of positive masculinity, of a man who did not buy into patriarchy, but this one example was enough to make her continue her quest to redefine love in feminist terms while making love an accessible experience for everyone.

hooks became a Christian-Buddhist after encountering Buddhism in college and continued her exploration of the framework that Christian-Buddhist thought offered her to understand and respond to love, suffering, discrimination, and connection. In 2020, during the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by white police officers, hooks’s work reentered the zeitgeist, with All About Love entering the New York Times Best Sellers list 21 years after its publication, and hooks was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 women of 2020.

In 2004, hooks moved to Berea, Kentucky, to work as a Distinguished Professor of Residence at Berea College. During her tenure, she established the bell hooks center to provide a space for underrepresented students, especially students of color, female students, and queer students, to complete their work. The center offers radical feminist and anti-racist programming. In 2021, hooks died of kidney failure in Berea.