The dark academia literary genre is not new to Connecticut.
Seminal titles like “Ninth House,” based at Yale, typically focus on an outsider thrown into elite academic circles and the secrets that come with them.
Kamilah Cole’s “An Arcane Inheritance” takes that a step further with an entirely queer cast of characters and a female lead who is Black and an immigrant.
“I decided to make my main character a first-generation immigrant, somebody who was born in Jamaica,” Cole explained on Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live.” “(She) has to adjust to a school system she doesn't understand; a history that she is really still learning, even into her 20s.”
Cole herself is a Jamaica native, who attended New York University. It was during college that she first spent time at University of Connecticut, visiting her best friend at UConn in Storrs and finding herself envious of the traditional campus layout.
“UConn has a campus. Like, NYU doesn't have that,” she said with a laugh.
“It was my first taste of what a college experience was supposed to be traditionally like,” Cole said. “So when it came time to build my fictional college, I knew that it was going to be somewhere in Connecticut. I chose Hartford because I really liked the location of the University of Hartford. I liked the history of Hartford.”
The novel’s introduction is a history of the fictional school, which delves into the dark aspects of the real region it’s based in. Readers are soon introduced to the main character, Ellory Morgan, who spends the novel grappling both with America’s racist history and the existence of magic on her campus.
“(Writing this) just felt so healing for me. A lot of what happens to Ellory in the book is inspired by things that happened to me in college, or stories with my friends of what happened to them in college,” she said. “A lot of it is also obviously inspired by my moving through the world as a dark-skinned Black woman, first-generation immigrant.”
This was longtime fantasy author Cole’s debut in the adult genre, after many Young Adult books under her belt. Cole said she did not grow up seeing herself in the genre, but now works to include representation in her work for the next generation of readers like her.
“Fantasy allows you to kind of deal with societal ills in a way that is a bit more palatable,” she said. “I shouldn't say ‘palatable.’ It's a little bit more bearable.”
Learn more
You can hear more about “An Arcane Inheritance” and Cole’s writing philosophies in her recent appearance on Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live.”
