BELL HOOKS, who resides in New York City, is without question the most prolific and influential Black feminist critic/theorist on the contemporary scene. She wrote her first book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981) while she was a nineteen year old undergraduate at Stanford University. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, she graduated from Stanford University and completed the Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Santa Cruz where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison. hooks’ contribution to feminist theory has been significant; she helped to redefine feminism as a broad political movement to end all forms of domination. “Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure than women have equal rights with men,” she asserted. “It is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels--sex, race, and class, to name a few---and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” The most visible Black woman public intellectual in the U.S. media (a mostly male group which includes Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Manning Marable, Michael Eric Dyson), Bell Hooks has published over twenty books. They include Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center; Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations; Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black; Black Looks: Race and Representation; Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West). In addition to her political writing, she has written a number of autobiographical texts--bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Wounds of Passion: a Writing Life; and Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work.

An engaged teacher/scholar, she has been on the faculty at Yale University, Oberlin College, and City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and her educational theory, cultural criticism, and creative pedagogy have been the subject of a scholarly monograph, Bell Hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: a Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness (1998), and a video, Bell Hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation (Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA).