bell hooks

cantfindit

Activist and writer bell hooks was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky as Gloria Jean Watkins. As a child, hooks performed poetry readings of work by Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She earned a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from the University of California-Santa Cruz. hooks was the author of over 30 books, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 20 most influential books published in 20 years; Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984); Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1991), winner of the American Book Award/Before Columbus Foundation Award; Teaching to Transgress (1994); the children’s book Homemade Love (2002), named the Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year; and the poetry collections And There We Wept (1978) and When Angels Speak of Love (2005), and Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Award. Throughout her life, hooks explored the relationship between sexism, racism, and economic disparity in books aimed at scholars and at the public. hooks was the winner of the Writer’s Award from the Lila-Wallace—Reader’s Digest Fund, and has been named one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals by the Atlantic. She taught at the USC, Yale University, Oberlin College, the City College of New York, and Berea College. hooks died in late 2021 at the age of 69. Source 

Appalachian Elegy (8.)

snow-covered earth

such silence

still divine presence

echoes immortal migrants

all life sustained

darkness comes

suffering touches us

again and again

there is pain

there in the midst of

such harsh barrenness

a cardinal framed in the glass

red light

calling away despair

eternal promise

everything changes and ends

Published:

2012

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Black Arts Movement

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Agency

Memory & The Past

Nature

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times