Author and social activist bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins. Her pen name is her great-grandmother’s name and she used lowercase letters to honor her great-grandmother, whom she greatly admired, and to show that the work itself mattered more than the person who wrote it. In All About Love, she examines how our understanding about love often falls short. She invites readers to consider a different kind of love that lends itself to compassion, forgiveness, and peace in our personal and professional lives and in our communities and beyond.

This 2012 poetry collection was inspired by author and activist hooks’s upbringing in rural Kentucky. In an interview with another of my Kentucky favorites, Silas House, hooks once said she wrote Appalachian Elegy because she “want[ed] people to really hear an African American voice claiming Kentucky and claiming belonging.” She wrote this collection after coming back home to Kentucky after a thirty-year absence. With a strong sense of place, the poems explore creation, lamentation, the historical Kentucky landscape, climate change, marginalization, and the ways identity can change over time.