bell hooks, groundbreaking feminist thinker, dies at 69

hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and later gave herself the pen name bell hooks in honor of her maternal great-grandmother. She loved reading from an early age, majored in English at Stanford University and received a master’s in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she began writing “Ain’t I a Woman.”