Author collections or boards?

I am creating a multi-author blog (without using multisite) and am wondering if there’s a way to allow authors to create new “collections” and add a series of their own posts to them.

This functionality would be similar to Pinterest in that every author has their own “boards” or “collections” they create and publish to but no other authors would be able to publish to them.

The “boards” or “collections” would be publicly viewable though

These could be the standard WordPress categories, but then my goal is to make it so if an author creates a new category, no one else could use that category.