bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an American feminist author, scholar, and activist. She is best known for her trailblazing writings on feminism and its intersections with race, class, gender, and sexuality. According to her biography on Black Past, an online resource that publishes information regarding African American history, hooks was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to Veodis Watkins, a janitor, and Rosa Bell Watkins, a homemaker. hooks adopted her pen name in tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks chose to stylize her name in the lowercase, as bell hooks, hoping that doing so would draw less attention to her identity and more to her feminist thinking. hooks died from kidney failure in Berea, Kentucky, in December 2021 at age 69.

One of hooks’s best-known works is her first book of nonfiction, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, published in 1981. The book explores the intersections of race, class, and gender as they relate to Black women’s lives. Considered to be “her most significant scholarly work,” the book established hooks as an important voice in the feminist literary space.

In All About Love: New Visions, hooks examines the topic of love in contemporary society.