Bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), who is best known by her penname bell hooks, which deliberately doesn't use any capital letters, is an award-winning African-American feminist writer. She grew up in a working class family in Kentucky where she was born. In 1976 she started teaching. In 1978 her first book was published. It was a collection of poems called And There We Wept: Poems. South End Press published Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism in 1981. It was her first academic book to be published. Watkins has said that her penname doesn't use capital letters because the ideas in her writing are more important than the fact that she wrote them. She is Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York.