Valerie Boyd loved bringing together creatives who captured her discerning attention. Her “gatherings” as she called them, were like heirloom recipes melding the flavors of this award-winning author with that impassioned visual artist; a dash of southern cuisine chef, a taste of talented photographer. It was her joy to ignite coalescence, to bake meaningful connections into fruitful coalitions, into nourishing community.

“In these troubled times, it’s crucial for us to seek out and privilege moments of joy and delight. This will be one of those moments,” Boyd wrote.

This is what Boyd, acclaimed writer, scholar, editor and mentor who died in February, has accomplished in her latest book, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic. Nearing the completion of a formidable project – editing 35 years of Alice Walker’s journals – and facing her inexorable death by pancreatic cancer, Boyd made a breathtaking decision to begin, and complete, another wide-ranging literary work. Bigger Than Bravery is the result of Boyd’s unshakable belief in joy as an act of resistance for Black people, in the power of gathering at the crossroads.

Bigger Than Bravery, a collection of essays and poems, features celebrated writers such as Pearl Cleage, Alice Walker, Imani Perry, Tayari Jones, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Kiese Laymon. Boyd also chose to seek and commission the work of fierce, emergent talent like her former student Josina Guess, Imani e Wilson and poet and documentary film-maker L Lamar Wilson. These writers, she signals by her selection, are our literary future.

“Valerie helped us to see the value in ourselves,” L Lamar Wilson told me of the impact that Boyd still has on a vast community of writers. “She would not let us be shaken, would not let us give up on ourselves, would not let us play ourselves small. She made us believe that we could do the big thing. She was always telling me, until the end of her life on this side of forever, not to lose sight of my divine calling.”

“Valerie always said, ‘Come with me!’ and where that would end up was a surprise, but that it would be a good destination was a sure thing. Valerie offered that ethic, that practice, that embrace, to an infinity of us,” said Imani e Wilson.

Bigger Than Bravery chronicles the shards of fear, loneliness, grief and rage that characterized the beginning and height of the pandemic that sliced through the Black community mercilessly, highlighting all of the nation’s malignant disparities. It acknowledges the evil that caused the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and conveys the searing experience of living through a Covid infection in the early and mid-times before there was a vaccine and the virus was at its most virulent. It mourns and honors those the pandemic snatched from us.

But the overriding tone of the work emphasizes deep healing, raucous laughter, bright joy, all kinds of good food, and yes, the overused but utterly appropriate “resilience” that Black folk honed and expanded in our communities, our kitchens, our virtual church services, dance parties, virtual friends and family gatherings, cautious visits, gardens and in so much music. We lost so many, and we contained multitudes, held in a loving embrace. We were defiant in our joy, justified in our delight.

“We celebrated every friendship, every glass of wine, every fleeting, irreplaceable, not-promised-to-you precious moment. We laughed a lot. And we loved each other fiercely. Just like now,” Cleage wrote.

Boyd considered this book a work of literature and of history. She decided on an unconventional route to publication, turning to her friend and former student KaToya Ellis Fleming, who had just started a new job as an editor at Lookout Books and assistant professor of publishing arts at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. It was Fleming’s first acquisition. She, Lookout publisher Emily Louise Smith, and the Publishing Practicum students put final, loving touches on it after Boyd died.

“Valerie was excited to be preparing the next generation of writers, publishers and literary citizens,” Fleming said, explaining that Boyd was very intentional about every aspect of the book. “She didn’t collect essays as much as she gathered authors whose writing she wanted to see as part of this collection.” The essays are deliberately ordered, poetry intersperses narrative and gives the readers’ soul a place to rest and reflect. Each piece is in conversation with every other, and while centering Black experiences, they are universal messages to the attuned ear.

“My piece doesn’t reference Blackness directly. It’s more just like, here we are as human beings. There are embedded cultural references in the way I think about being sick, but also knowing that it’s a universal human experience, especially in our workaholic culture. Just let go. Get well slow. Claim rest as holy work,’” Guess said.

The quarantine has lifted. People have chosen to be vaccinated or not. And if they have the choice, to return to the office or not. We have buried our dead, and don’t think too much about long Covid survivors if we don’t have to. We are over it already, so understandably eager to restore some sense of normalcy, to get back to life. Bigger Than Bravery reminds the reader, so many of us who are ready to move on from the pandemic, that this Great Pause and this Great Call was and is a profound and prophetic time. Forgetting is not an option. Not a wise one, anyway. There are deep lessons and golden blessings in the time of pandemic. “Every goodbye ain’t gone,” a Black folk saying offered as a reminder by L Lamar Wilson.

In Boyd’s introduction to Bigger Than Bravery, an essay I was initially reluctant to read because it felt somehow final as it was the last story she wrote before she died, she gently reminds those of us who traveled awhile in her extraordinary orbit that death is merely an illusion. A trick the mind plays, a hoax. Reflecting on the death of her father, and offering a transcendent gift, she wrote: “And then there’s the dying part – the biggest myth of all” and “If you allow, this book can be a long exhalation, a silent prayer, a solace and a comfort as we reach toward the promise of brighter days ahead.”

Imani e Wilson added: “There is no need to say goodbye. Whether here or on the other side, I will see you in the morning.”

• Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic is out now