Cultural critic and teacher
bell hooks
Appalachia · Kentucky
Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bell hooks wrote about love, pedagogy, race, gender, and class. She later taught at Berea College, where the bell hooks center continues work in her name.
On the shelves
Books in the collection
Essays
All About Love
bell hooks
hooks examines love as a practice that can shape personal relationships and public life.
Essays
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Essays on place, race, land, and return connect hooks’s Kentucky roots with a wider ethic of belonging.
Memoir
Bone Black
bell hooks
Fragmentary memories trace the making of a writer in a Black Southern family.
Essays
Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks
hooks brings classroom experience to questions about freedom, authority, and participation in education.
From the Lyric
Continue the story
Reading notes / 01
Black Appalachian voices
Poems, recipes, and stories rooted in Kentucky and the places writers carry with them.
Read Black Appalachian voicesReading notes / 02
Classrooms of Change
Schools, teachers, and families who insisted on the right to learn.
Read Classrooms of ChangeReading notes / 03
Freedom and the right to read
For teachers and students studying emancipation, literacy, and education.
Read Freedom and the right to readReading notes / 04
Kentucky Black Writers
Poetry, fiction, memoir, and essays by writers with documented Kentucky ties.
Read Kentucky Black WritersReading notes / 05
Where we belong
A book club conversation about home, family, migration, and memory.
Read Where we belong