Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2001 nominee for the NAACP’s Image Award, and one of Time’s 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered. A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women’s studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, bell hooks (renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist) skewers our view of love as romance. She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including the New York Times bestseller All About Love. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain’t I a Woman-written when she was only nineteen-how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized. With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writers journey in Wounds of Passion. She's written over three dozen books and her first (non-poetry), Ain't I a Woman, was written when she was just nineteen. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. Wounds of Passion, which is the second of bell hooks' memoirs, is about the romantic relationship that heavily influenced hooks' development into one of the most prolific feminist writers and cultural critics of our time. Bell hooks was an American author who deserved the capital letters she chose to spurn.īorn Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers’ focus where it belonged: on her work.

Wounds of Passion by bell hooks