Tolling For Thee

the bell hooks we knew

Proposals Due: March 1, 2027 | Anticipated Publication: Sept 2027

bell hooks changed the way we think. This book, however, is about the way she made people feel.

Her well-established, intellectual legacy will be taught and argued over for generations. However, between the footnotes and the theory lived a woman who laughed in a particular way, who showed up unexpected, who said the one thing you needed to hear in a moment you will never forget. Who cooked something. Who called. Who stayed.

This collection is for her.

Tolling For Thee: the bell hooks we knew is a gathering of personal narratives, remembrances, and reflections from those whose lives she touched directly. Not analyses or academic assessments. We are after the stories that that live in the memories of the people who knew her human side, her non-performative self.

We want to know her as a person. We want readers who never met her to love her as she was.

Why This Book

In Outlaw Culture, bell hooks wrote, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom.”

She understood love as practice, as discipline, as the most radical act available to us. And those who knew her experienced that understanding in the way she engaged, listened, and even challenged.

She was a rural Kentucky girl who became one of the most cited scholars in the world. She was a teacher who genuinely changed her students. She was a friend and a colleague, a stranger who became unforgettable in a single conversation. She held complexity without apology.

This book seeks to address that complexity and bring her lived self to the page honoring the woman beyond her immaculate oeuvre.

What We Are Looking For

We are seeking personal narratives that bring bell hooks to life on the page. Show her in motion. Capture her humor, her warmth, her directness, her contradictions, her grace.

You do not need to have known her well or for long. If a single conversation, a class, an encounter at a reading, or a letter she wrote illuminated a truth of who she was, we want to read it.

We are particularly drawn to:

Stories of her humor. bell was funny. Tell us about it.

Stories of her in ordinary life. What did she talk about when she was not talking about theory? Where did she go? What did she love? What annoyed her? What made her light up?

Stories of her as a teacher. Not what she taught, but how. What it felt like to be in a room where she was thinking out loud.

Stories of her generosity. The time she made for someone who sought her wisdom and patience. The thing she said that cost her nothing and meant everything.

Stories of her Kentucky roots. She was deeply tied to the place she came from, returning to it after years away.

Stories that hold complexity. bell hooks was not simple. She could be demanding, exacting, or difficult when holding to her high standards. We are not looking only for hagiography. We are looking for truth told with love. We seek stories written with the grace and clarity she herself brought to difficult subjects.