When I call myself a gatherer, I mean that, even without my hands in dirt, I aggregate, together with collaborators, disparate pieces from an ecosystem, and develop the appropriate container for each collection. It was only when Laura Coombs pointed out the byline for the book Pleasure Activism (2019), “gathered and edited by adrienne maree brown,” that I began to see myself in the term and its use. Pleasure Activism is a gathering of ideas, stories, interviews, held together in the shape of a book. As a container, it is more than just the sum of its parts; the book is the site around which its public forms, and a place in which to gather that public.

-Mindy Seu, On Gathering