• To set this type of ancestral, organic magic apart from the magic of the Order.
• Because of the power of this word in my community; imagery using roots exists across Black music, pop culture, and film.
• Because, for me and many other Black people in the South, it feels as if the very soil that helped grow this country is soaked with the acknowledged and unacknowledged blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved Africans and their descendants. And, in truth, it is.
• To hint at the solution to Bree’s turmoil in the book, which is to recognize the living nature of love in her life, alongside death, and to literally go underground to find the truth of her origin.

UNC-CHAPEL HILL HISTORY

When I talk about Legendborn, I often talk about King Arthur and when I first fell in love with Arthurian legends. (Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, in 1995, by the way.) I also say that it’s about the ways grief and history walk beside us. UNC-Chapel Hill is many things: my alma mater twice over, a beloved epicenter for some of my favorite memories, the oldest public university in the country to admit and graduate students, a site of local and national history, a school casually abundant with secret societies, and, undeniably, a campus and community still reckoning with its deep connections to slavery.

Legendborn is a contemporary fantasy work of fiction whose setting is a real place with real history. I made up the Order of the Round Table and Early College. The cemetery is real, but I added mausoleums. I took some liberties with Battle Park and campus geography. The Unsung Founders Memorial exists, but I moved its location. There is no Carr statue, but the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam stood for over a hundred years on Carolina’s campus and was the subject of decades of debate and protest until it was taken down by activists in 2018.

Some of the most painful stories in the book are facts: the unmarked, disrespected, and segregated graves; the open brutality of the real Julian Carr against an unnamed woman; that Black students live and learn on a campus built by enslaved people held in bondage by celebrated men who would have wanted to enslave us, too. These facts and monuments have mirrors in other spaces and at other schools, and I hope light continues to be shined on them.

KING ARTHUR

If one must find Arthur’s beginning, I would turn to Wales. Still, I could never list all of my sources for Arthurian lore and legend. Like Nick says, fifteen hundred years is a long time! Arthuriana is absorptive and has always invited invention and reinvention. Arthur exists in a network of narratives; there is no single story, no sacred text, no definitive version, no single voice. Instead there are many versions of many legends, reimaginings, and retellings. Consider Legendborn a contribution to the collection.