bell hooks Taught Us To Both Practice and Preach Radical Love
To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” Writer, scholar, and trailblazing feminist bell hooks wrote these words in her 2002 book, All About Love. What a gift it is that they would later help us come to terms with her own early departure from this world.
A prolific writer named one of TIME’s 100 Women of the Year, bell hooks has traveled the world influencing your favorite industry leaders and all with little fanfare. Like many Black women academics before her, bell hooks gave so much of herself: to theorizing, to aspiring writers, and to the future she was writing into existence. She understood the sense of urgency in her work and wasted no opportunity to push any and every conversation forward. Publishing between thirty and forty works in her lifetime, hooks wrote feverishly while never letting the quality of her work falter. She once said, “It is not simply a question of finding time to write — one also writes against time, knowing that life is short.” How right she was.