Love
is on the syllabus.
You will feel it
when you come into our classrooms
eyes downward
thinking you are
too much
your voice your style
so loud all wrong.
Look up.
Speak out.
There is only this moment
to be
to be together.
We will hear you
we will hold you
because she taught us
how
her words
a hook piercing through our skin
a bell sounding in our ears
tolling telling
that on the final exam
the question must be
did we love you
enough?

Artist’s Statement:

As a white working-class person from Queens, New York, I had to suppress and alter many aspects of myself to become who      I am today, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware with a PhD from Harvard University. Reading and teaching bell hooks’s work, however, has always encouraged me to embrace, rather than deny, elements of my own identity and experience,      which do not conform to the class-based standards of propriety that still prevail in academia.      Instead I learned      from hooks to reach out actively to undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds and make them feel that they, too, belong in the world of higher education. Her essays have taught me so much about what feminist pedagogy must be and why: that it should be informed not only by inclusion, but also by love for the subject, for the process, and for one another.