Poet, scholar, and activist bell hooks has died at the age of sixty-nine. She is the author of more than forty books, including All About Love: New Visions, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, and poetry collections And There We Wept and Appalachian Elegy. Since 2004, she lived in Kentucky, her home state, where she taught at Berea College and founded the bell hooks Institute, which houses her personal collection of African American art. New York’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School has featured hooks in many public lectures over the years, in conversations with Cornel West, Gloria Steinem, Arthur Jafa, and more. You can find videos of the events on the New School’s YouTube page.
Colm Tóibín has won this year’s David Cohen Prize for Literature, which celebrates the body of work of a writer living in the UK or Republic of Ireland. “I think of him as a Renaissance man who can do almost everything with equal brilliance,” said Hermoine Lee, who served as chair of the 2021 judging panel.
PEN America has announced the longlists for its eleven 2021 award categories. Among the nominees for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award are Joy Williams’s Harrow, Percival Everett’s The Trees, and Elissa Washuta’s White Magic.
At NiemanLab, a roundup of predictions of what 2022 will hold for journalism: Anita Varma considers the possibility that solidarity will replace objectivity as a newsroom ideal; Joanne McNeil thinks the age of treating tech insiders as tech experts is over now that many journalists specialize in the sector; Andrew Freedman emphasizes that the climate crisis needs to be reflected in business, politics, and foreign policy stories; and more.
The late artist and author Edith Schloss’s new memoir The Loft Generation covers her years at the center of modern art in New York, observing the big personalities and radical ideas animating the scene. For the New Republic, Max Holleran writes about the book and the era: “Life in the lofts was both intellectually stimulating and self-consciously bohemian. Nobody was more scorned than the artists who departed to take newly lucrative jobs in commercial art or advertising.”