Aya Collective Publishing

This past Saturday, we kicked off the first of two writing fellowships that we recently launched: Tracing Our Spiritual and Cultural Legacies. Seven of us gathered at the Cultural Wellness Center, seated around the table, and began sharing our inspiration and motivation for being part of this work over the next year.

Our backgrounds and experiences were different, as were the reasons that brought each of us into the fellowship. But as we listened to one another, one thread became increasingly clear:

There is an urgency to preserving and transcribing our family narratives, our people’s narratives, right now.

There are stories that are waiting to be remembered. Stories that live in our families, our bodies, our communities, our institutions, and our spirits. Stories that carry knowledge, wisdom, history, and possibility. And if we do not intentionally make space to remember, document, and share them, we risk losing more than stories. We risk losing the knowledge they carry.

This is why we write.

Over the next year, we will continue gathering in community through both of our writing fellowships, including our inaugural writing fellowship, which begins next Saturday, August 22. We will gather to write, remember, reflect, learn, and create.

But these fellowships are not separate from the other work happening at Aya Collective. They are part of it.

For years, we have been building spaces that invite Black women to reclaim writing as a practice of reflection, connection, knowledge production, and transformation. We have created writing spaces. We have published anthologies. We have supported individual writers. We have preserved stories. We have explored Black women’s experiences in higher education. And we have continued asking what becomes possible when we take our writing—and the knowledge held within it—seriously.

This year, many of those threads are beginning to converge.

Our Black women in higher education anthology, At the Gates: Black Women, Knowledge, and Liberation in Higher Education, brings together Black women’s experiences and intellectual contributions to higher education, insisting that these stories belong in the archive.

Our Writing as Sacred Practice project invites us to consider writing not simply as a skill or product, but as a practice through which we connect memory, spirit, knowledge, and lived experience.

And our Sacred Work of Black Writers fellowships create the space to do this work collectively—to preserve our histories, produce new knowledge, and create texts that can be carried forward.

Taken together, these projects reveal something important about who Aya Collective is becoming.

We are more than an organization that publishes books, though publishing remains at the heart of what we do.

We are building an ecosystem where we reclaim writing as sacred practice, preserve collective memory, produce transformative knowledge, and publish work that shapes our communities and institutions.

This is the work we have been building toward.

And over the next several months, we will be sharing more about each of these threads—and how they connect. These are not simply ideas that guide our work. They are practices we are living into.

And this fall, you will have an opportunity to witness what happens when these practices come together.

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