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. In the 80s Watkins started a group called Sisters of the Yam for black women to talk about their problems.
bell hooks was the name of Watkins' great-grandmother. 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 has been Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York since 1995.[1] In her writing Watkins is critical of society. She uses the phrase 'white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy' to describe how the United States is white supremacist, patriarchal (ruled by men), and capitalistic and these things are connected to each other. The way that she uses the term 'white supremacist' is different to how it is usually used by people.