‘I Am a Writer Because of bell hooks’

listen little sister
angels make their hope here
in these hills
follow me
I will guide you

(From Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place, by bell hooks)

For all the things that bell hooks was—one of the foremost Black intellectuals in the world, renowned feminist, author of more than 40 books, revolutionary cultural critic—and all the places she lived, she was still Gloria Jean Watkins from Hopkinsville, daughter of Rosa Bell and Veotis. There is no doubt that her entire body of work was shaped by her homeplace and that when she found her voice, she helped a generation of Black Kentucky women writers find ours too.

Though bell often wrote of her “wounded childhood,” she was also influenced by her ancestors, like her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks (from whom she devised, she explains that her spirit of resistance was nurtured by rural Black agrarians who valued self-reliance and self-determination above all else. “When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully,” she later wrote in . bell often spoke of the loss she felt when her family left the hills to move into town. She called this longing her “first deep grief.” The significance of our Kentucky roots—the wounds, the salve—was among the things bell and I talked about after we became friends.