FILE- Portrait of American author and feminist bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins). bell hooks, the groundbreaking author, educator and activist whose explorations of how race, gender, economics and politics were intertwined made her among the most influential thinkers of her time, has died.
She was 69.In a statement issued through William Morrow Publishers, hooks' family announced that she died Wednesday in Berea, Kentucky, home to the bell hooks center at Berea College.
Additional details were not immediately available."She was a giant, no nonsense person who lived by her own rules, and spoke her own truth in a time when Black people, and women especially, did not feel empowered to do that," Dr.