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Author, feminist, and cultural critic bell hooks will deliver the keynote speech for Women’s History Month at Lafayette on Tuesday, March 27. She will speak on “Ending Domination: Race, Gender, and Class” at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Lafayette’s Kirby Hall of Civil Rights.
Before her talk, hooks will hold an open conversation with interested community members at 4 p.m. in Interfaith Chapel, Hogg Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.
Acclaimed as one of the nation’s top intellectuals by Atlantic Monthly, hooks was named one of Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life.” Hooks is the author of 20 books, including Killing Rage, Teaching to Transgress, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.
“She writes with great insight and passion about the ways racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression manifest themselves in American culture, and about ways in which we can work to dismantle systems of oppression,” says Deborah Byrd, associate professor of English and coordinator of Women’s Studies at Lafayette.
Hooks’ most recent book, Salvation: Black People and Love, was published in February by William Morrow & Co. It deals with how race shapes our nation’s thinking about the nature of love, how people love, and whom they love.
Her national bestseller, All About Love: New Visions, was recently released in paperback. “I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood,” she wrote in the book’s preface. “Turning away, we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” The New York Times calls the book “a warm affirmation that love is possible and an attack on the culture of narcissism and selfishness.”
Hooks was born in Kentucky into a family of six girls and one boy. She finished her undergraduate work at Stanford University and her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously an English professor at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks most recently served as Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She spends much of her time writing and lecturing around the nation and abroad. She resides in New York City and Tampa, Fla.