hooks was born in Kentucky in 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins. Profoundly influenced by the women in her lineage, she adopted the pen name “bell hooks” to honor her great-grandmother. She intentionally chose to keep her name lowercase to emphasize the importance of her works rather than her persona. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks describes her own experiences with patriarchal culture and the ways that both her mother and her father acted out patriarchal structures that justified violence and aggression.

As a member of a rural working-class Black family with six children, hooks’s philosophies were shaped by her experiences with racism and classism. She attended a segregated school, and her family struggled financially; she recalled experiences such as hunting with her grandmother for worms and churning butter. hooks earned a BA in English in 1973 from Stanford University and an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, she obtained a doctorate in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She taught at several distinguished universities and received a plethora of awards, including the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics and the award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 2001 for Happy to Be Nappy.