Bell hooks, groundbreaking feminist thinker, dies at 69

hooks defined feminism as "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression." Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as bell hooks (she wrote under the lower case nom de plume), the groundbreaking author, educator and activist whose explorations of how race, gender, economics and politics intertwined helped shape academic and popular debates over the past 40 years, 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, although her close friend Dr Linda Strong-Leek said she had been ill for a long time.