American writer and activist bell hooks was BOTD in 1952. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville in racially-segregated Kentucky, she studied in segregated and integrated schools before attending Stanford University. After graduation, she taught English and ethnic studies while completing her doctorate on the work of Toni Morrison. Her first major work, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism was published in 1981, analysing the impact of racism and sexism on black women and their devaluation within mainstream feminism. She adopted the pseudonym “bell hooks” in homage to her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks, spelling it in lowercase letters to shift readers’ focus away from her identity and towards the substance of her writing. She wrote extensively about masculinity, patriarchy and the politics of aesthetics and visual culture in books including Talking Back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, and Art on my mind: visual politics. Her 1999 book All About Love: New Visions, a treatise about finding and sustaining love within a homophobic culture, became a surprise international bestseller. She also published a memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood and several children’s books. hooks identified as “queer-pas-gay“, defining queer as “not who you’re having sex with, but about being at odds with everything around you“. In a 2017 interview, she noted that she had been celibate for 17 years and would love to have a partner” noting “I don’t think my life is less meaningful” for having been single. She died in 2021, aged 69.