Music world reacts to death of award-winning author and activist bell hooks
the college’s statement said.Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on September 25, 1952, hooks adopted the pen name “bell hooks” from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She kept her name in lowercase letters to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas, while intentionally breaking culturally imposed grammar rules.She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University in 1973, a master’s in English from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976 and a doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.Hooks published her first book of poetry, And There We Wept, in 1978 while she was teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. Her