The last Woman of the Week of this year is in honour of bell hooks, a pioneering feminist, activist and prolific writer, who died aged 69 this month.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell was raised in a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Growing up in segregated schools, bell would read Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes and William Wordsworth. Once the South became desegregated in the 60s, bell’s adolescence was framed by the violence and upheaval she faced from her predominantly white teachers and peers.

It led to the creation of her first book “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”, which she began writing aged 19 while completing her BA in English at Stanford in 1971, and published ten years later after receiving her doctorate in English from the University of California.

The book, which was published under the pen name bell hooks in tribute to her grandmother Bell Blair Hooks (written in lowercase to emphasise the substance of the book rather than the name), was a turning point in breaking down the legacy of slavery and its effect on the “ongoing dehumanisation of Black women” and critiquing the revolutionary politics arising against this mistreatment that still centre around the “male psyche”. She wrote that true freedom could only come by accepting that race, class and gender are parts of our identity that are infallibly linked.

bell also wrote about what she coined the “oppositional gaze”, where she explored the terror, she felt as a child to not stare too long, and how white slave owners would punish their slaves for staring to long. For bell, the oppositional gaze was a form of “rebellious desire”, a sign of defiance and a decision to assume agency when facing both the white and male gaze.

Throughout her life, bell would continue to write ground-breaking pieces of the relationships between sexism, racism, and economic disparity, touching on patriarchy, masculinity, love, and sexuality.

In 2004, bell moved back to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, where she would remain until her death. The Appalachian elegy poems are a tribute to her home state, where she covers the pain of its past and the hope of a future rewritten.