Callaloo presents: A bell hooks reading list

This spring, Vice President JD Vance announced the release of his new memoir, Communion, prompting a grassroots social media campaign that urged readers to—as The Word Is Change bookstore in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn put it—“make sure if any book called Communion makes the bestseller list, it’s by bell hooks.”

Published in 2002, hooks’ Communion: The Female Search for Love is a call for women to reclaim the search for love as a noble pursuit. The shared title brings to mind an earlier parallel: Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and hooks’ Appalachian Elegy (2012), a juxtaposition that, for many readers of hooks’ work, brings a welcome opportunity to revisit the author’s enduring contributions to ideas about place, identity, and American life.

We’re particularly thrilled that this happy titular “accident” gives us an opportunity to hold up bell hooks and her work once again. Most recently, Callaloo featured a special section in Vol 43.2 commemorating the inaugural bell hooks symposium at Berea College. The event took place in 2023, two years after her death; it is wonderful to see how hooks’ writing and insights continue to be central to urgent conversations about love, dignity, freedom, and responsibility. And though Crystal E. Wilkinson’s double issue on Black Appalachia (Callaloo Vols 42.1 and 42.2) does not focus specifically on hooks, Wilkinson writes in her introductions“...in Belonging: A Culture of Place, my dear friend bell hooks says, ‘I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream of that. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.’ In Affrilachia we found beloved community and have been doing so for more than thirty years.” In these pages, Affrilachian Poets like Frank X. Walker, Shanna L. Smith, and Diamond Forde are in deep conversation with her reflections on the realities of her upbringing in Kentucky.

We hope that you will enjoy revisiting not only hooks’ original work in our reading list below, but the criticism and reflection that has appeared in Callaloo and other JHUP journals, as well as selections from other presses. And of course, we encourage you to add Communion and Appalachian Elegy to your Bookshop carts and keep her name ringing on the best seller lists. 

Callaloo 

43.2, Spring 2025

Special section commemorating the inaugural bell hooks symposium at Berea College

Special Issues: Black Appalachia
Guest Edited by Crystal Wilkinson
42.1, Winter 2024, Part I: Creative and Personal Perspectives
42.2, Spring 2024, Part II: Critical and Scholarly Perspectives: A Special Issue

Site(s), Sight(s), and Memory: The Anxiety of Morrison’s Influence on bell hooks
Hue Woodson
South Central Review
41.1, Spring 2024

 

"Even in a Place of Sorrow, Even in a Place of Joy": Intersections of Blackness and Southernness in the Works of bell hooks and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Emily D. Palermo 
Mississippi Quarterly
76.2, 2024

 

Mining Memories with Donald Trump in the Anthropocene
Arthur Rose
MFS Modern Fiction Studies
64.4, Winter 2018

 

 

Highlights from other presses

belonging to Place: The Creative Community and Artistic Legacy of bell hooks
Edited by E. Gale Greenlee and shauna caldwell
University Press of Kentucky, 2027

bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom
Edited by Megan Feifer Maia L. Butler, and Joanna Davis-McElligatt
Bloomsbury, 2025

Love Letters to bell hooks: Narratives Celebrating the Influence of a Transgressive Educator 
Edited by Tricia M. Kress, Robert Lake, Nadia Khan-Roopnarine, Perpetual Anastasia Hayfron and Nicolle Session
Routledge, 2025

I am a writer because of bell hooks
Crystal Wilkinson
The Atlantic, December 2021

'All my people come from the hills': 
In Celebration of bell hooks: Three poems from Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
Alyssia Nicole Harris
Scalawag Magazine, December 2021

A Conversation with bell hooks
George Brosi
Appalachian Heritage 40.2, Spring 2012