"bell hooks's brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence." --Gloria Steinem
With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer's journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved out of words, lighting the way for all writers who would tread in her wake.
This memoir is an illuminating vision of a writer's life from one of America's treasured authors.
"I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us." --Maya Angelou

Hooks, Bell

bell hooks was an American author who deserved the capital letters she chose to spurn.
Born 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. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. 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. 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. 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. 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.