The essays constituting this online special issue, organized in memoriam, reflect on bell hooks’s influence on the contributors’ evolving relationships to their writing and work as well as deep connections to feminism, mothers, students, regions, ecologies, cultures, and the academy, among other facets of their lives. In taking up hooks’s mantle, the authors nuance literary forms and offer various expressions of gratitude to explore their struggles, growth, and healing as a result of hooks’s prolific career and generative activism.
The essays were gathered by guest editors Cécile Accilien, Manisha Desai, and Luz María Gordillo, who also serve as members of the journal’s editorial board. Instead of a written preface, they elected to engage in a virtual conversation about the meaning of hooks’s life and work to their trajectories as scholars and feminists of color during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.
You can find a link to the guest editors’ recorded introduction here and the 21 collected essays honoring bell hooks below.
Essays
“Talking Back: Remembering bell hooks” by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
“bell hooks said ‘No Black woman writer…can write too much’: A Black Feminist Reflection” by Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown
“Rebirthing My Girlhood Space: What bell hooks Taught Me about Writing and Love” by Rebecca Covarrubias
“Returning Home: Reflections on bell hooks’s Practice of Black Sustainability” by Mysia Anderson
“Land, Kinship, and Healing” by Tabitha Robin
“’Coming to Voice’ or Blatant Disrespect? An Epistolary Offering to My Mother for Understanding and Our Freedom” by Khahlia Sanders
“Teaching to Refuse and Reclaim: A Letter of Gratitude to bell hooks” by Courtney B. Cook
“A Collective Call to Rupture Academic English: Reflections on ‘Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words'” by Sara L. Chase Merrick
“bell hooks’s Memoirs” by Anne Donadey
“bell hooks: Feminism as the Transformational Work of Love” by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett
“Decolonial Love as a Foundation for Creative Business Practice” by Alia Fortune Weston
“Trusting in the Power of Compassion” by Leah Milne
“Coming of Age in Black Feminism and the Influence of bell hooks” by Angelyn Mitchell
“To Be A Feminist: In Honor of bell hooks” by Zakiya R. Adair
“Teaching to Transgress” by Margaret Stetz
“Observations of Knowledge and Landscape from the Margins: An Indigenous Bunun Woman-Centered Perspective” by adus palalavi
“Examining Blackness” by Ebony Aya
“bell hooks: In Life, In Memoriam, and A Few Lessons She Taught Me as a Feminist Educator and Black Gay Man” by David B. Green Jr.
“What bell hooks Taught Me…” by Leslie Morrow
“Penning Balm” by Leah Fulton
“An Offering of Gratitude” by Dominique M. Brown and Devin M. Moran