Acclaimed Author bell hooks Named Commencement Speaker at Southwestern University

May 8, 2002

Acclaimed author bell hooks will be the featured speaker for Southwestern University's commencement ceremonies to be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 11, at the Corbin J. Robertson Center on campus. Three hundred graduates will walk across the stage as part of Southwestern's Class of 2002.

hooks, who chooses not to capitalize her name, is a prolific writer, cultural critic, feminist theorist and poet, and the Brown Visiting Scholar in Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She is in residence on Southwestern's campus for five to six weeks each fall. When she is not in residency, hooks writes and lectures around the nation and abroad. With a passionate voice about the lived experiences of race, class, sex and gender in America, she has written over 20 books and countless essays, articles and interviews on subjects ranging from pop culture, film, pedagogy and poetry to children's literature, art and Buddhism.

Since her early publications such as Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks has been challenging the women's movement and anti-racist movements in the United States for more than two decades. Her more recent works include Salvation: Black People and Love, All About Love: New Visions, Where We Stand: Class Matters, and Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Crossing disciplinary boundaries within the academy, hooks' open and urgent writing has also crossed into public discourses about all forms of domination and the ways that we can all battle them.

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