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"To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality."
bell hooks
LOVE
is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
We are committed to the belief that some of the most important writing happening right now is being done by people who haven't yet been given the resources, the platform, or the signal that their work matters. The foundation exists to change that.
She left home at
seventeen
In 1970, a seventeen-year-old named Gloria Jean Watkins boarded a bus in Hopkinsville, Kentucky for Stanford University - a scholarship in hand, her parents' fear louder than their blessing.
At nineteen, in a dorm room, she began writing 'ain't i a woman'. Ten years passed before a publisher took it seriously. It rewrote feminism anyway.
Somewhere right now there is another writer on that bus.
THE SCHOLARS PROGRAM
We meet her at the bus.
Every prize in American letters meets writers after the world says yes.
The bell hooks Foundation supports underrepresented writers doing serious work in the tradition bell built - critical, fearless, and grounded in love.
bell hooks Fellowships of $30,000 buy a writer the one thing talent can't: time.
Fellowships are paired with workshops, editorial community, access to editors and agents, and first-book support.
THE PROGRAM MODEL
The Circle
Everything the foundation builds is one connected circle, and writers stand at the center of it.
Her work is not finished.
GROW
The alumni network is the compounding asset
CONVENE
Two homes, one in each of bell's worlds
IDENTIFY
Find the writers the prize committees haven't heard yet
.
bell hooks
Fellowships
ELEVATE
The famous and the unknown at one table
FUND
Real money without strings
DEVELOP
A check and a ceremony end a relationship. We begin one
the bell hooks foundation
Supporting underrepresented writers doing serious work in the tradition bell built - critical, fearless, and grounded in love.
New York City · thebellhooksfoundation.org
ABOUT bell hooks
Ideas matter more than the person
Gloria Jean Watkins was born September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She chose the name bell hooks - taken from her great-grandmother - and wrote it in lowercase deliberately, so that the ideas would always matter more than the person.
In 1981 - South End Press published bell's first book - ain't i a woman: black women and feminism. It was later named one of the twenty most influential women's books of the preceding two decades by Publishers Weekly.
She went on to publish more than 40 books across four decades. She taught at Stanford, Yale, Oberlin, Berea College and the City College of New York. She died December 15, 2021, in Berea, Kentucky, surrounded by family.
