“W hen black feminism needed a voice, bell hooks was born,” The Chronicle wrote in introducing an interview with the “doyenne of black cultural studies.” At the time a professor of English at the City University of New York, Gloria Watkins said that “I haven’t really tried to take on the identity of bell hooks. It’s been very much a writing name, and now more of a writing persona.” With her outspoken books, including Outlaw Culture and Teaching to Transgress, the pseudonym was about to take on a life its own. Today bell hooks, who has combined her literary work and cultural criticism with social activism, is a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian studies at Berea College, in Kentucky, where she was born. The bell hooks Institute there documents her work.
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