Why bell hooks doesn’t capitalize her name

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist.

bell hooks was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class African-American family.

bell hooks graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976.

During this time, at 19, bell hooks was writing her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which was published in 1981.

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.

Sadly, bell hooks died at her home in Berea, Kentucky, on December 15, 2021 at the age of 69.

Why bell hooks doesn’t capitalize her name

Gloria Jean Watkins borrowed the name “bell hooks” from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

bell hooks put the name in lowercase letters “to distinguish [herself from] her great-grandmother.”

In furtherance, bell hooks also explained that her unconventional lowercasing of her name signifies that what is most important to focus upon is her works, not her personal qualities: the “substance of books, not who I am.”