bell hooks, a Kentucky native and rural advocate, dies at 69

bell hooks (Washington Post photo by Margaret Thomas)

bell hooks, a rural Kentucky native whose writings on race, feminism, and the environment brought her international acclaim, died Dec. 15 at her home in Berea, Linda Blackford reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

hooks, 69, was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville and attended segregated schools in Christian County as a child. She took her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks' name as a pen name, using lower-case letters to emphasize the importance of the writing over the author. After graduating from Stanford University, she went on to earn a master's degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2004 she began teaching at Berea College in Kentucky, and in 2010 the school opened the bell hooks Institute, attracting visitors such as Gloria Steinem and Emma Watson.

Though hooks is best-known for her intersectional treatment of race and feminism, she was also a steadfast rural advocate and questioned why academics and activists discounted her voice when she spoke up for her home. In her essay "Connecting Appalachia to the World," she wrote: "As a Black woman writing about Appalachia, I receive little notice. I can talk race, gender, class, and be heard, but when I speak on environmental issues and all the ways agrarian Black folks hold the earth sacred few listen. As a voice for Appalachia, Wendell Berry is heard. Suddenly, I listened to his words and learned. Fervently, he teaches me. But like a mighty giant, a goliath, as a Kentucky Black female writer I stand always in his shadows. I am not considered a companion voice." (Berry is not from Appalachia but has been a voice for it.)

Her writing frequently addressed the intersection of rurality, race, and gender, especially in her 2009 book "Belonging: A Culture of Place," where she noted that mainstream urban Americans often dehumanized rural Kentuckians and saw their Appalachian subculture as a threat, "creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed."

Though hooks' death is mourned the world over, Kentucky writer Silas House perhaps said it best: "bell hooks was one of the most interesting, remarkable, and complicated people I've ever known. . . .  I will miss her, and the world is less fierce without her."