“The hardest part of the music is improvising, and it gets harder the older you are. Improvisation is a gathering together of all the evidence you have of how to resolve going from here to here to here.”
-Dizzy Gillespie

A Gathering Together is a journal that resists the easy and often unsophisticated attempt to say profound things in the moment, without deep contemplation, or in the heat of discursive battle.

There is a need to think about the world and our lives without the distractions of the quotidian. We cannot escape the concerns of the day, but we can and must retreat to spaces where the absurdities of the present age are not the immediate concern. 

Building upon John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie’s words, we seek to build a place that cultivates and discusses improvised acts of taking ourselves from here to there. We primarily select works that speak to Mekhet—the Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) term for resonating across time and space. This term is reserved for works that simultaneously transcend and address the moment they speak from, works that will last beyond the creator's last breath and still be relevant, works that put the writer and reader in conversation with the intellectual thought of Ancestors of all kinds. In the end, we offer a gathering of works that endure and elevate us to a space of inquiry and move us toward resolution of not only the challenges that mark our lives but also those that can no longer be our realities.

We seek to extend the best of Black thinking traditions by offering a platform for writers, thinkers, artists, and creators that embody the ethos of the ancestral imperative: “to know.” It builds upon the ancient Egyptian sesh, the djeli and doma of western Sudanic cultures, and the adanu of the Ewe, among others—knowledge traditions premised on creating and preserving that which we have created. These traditions have survived the great disaster of enslavement and colonialism, and they live today. 

Our writers are primarily descendants of Africa and her Diaspora. All writers whose works resonate with the human experience, and thus the Diasporic African experience, are considered. Our back issues are all available online and serve as a good model for the variety of writers and works we have featured.

We accept submissions in every genre and format: essays, short fiction, poetry, reviews, visual art, and film. We look forward to welcoming you to our gathering.

Masthead

Founding Editor

Josh Myers

Managing Editor, emerita

Jaminnia R. States

Associate Editors

Jahaan Shaheed; poetry, short stories

Anyabwile Love; essays, reviews

Ava Tiye Kinsey; poetry, short stories

Semora R. Howell; poetry, short stories, reviews

Gabrielle Oliver; poetry

Past Editors

Portia Richaé

Kailande Cassamajor

All work published by A Gathering Together is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.