Feminist & Gender Studies is proud to announce Elijah Douresseau (Creative Writing major and Feminist & Gender Studies minor '13) recently published The Nasty Business of a Bodyguard with an accompanying Spotify playlist featuring The Isley Brothers, Bob Marley & The Wailers, John Legend and The Roots, Gorillaz, and more!

In it, Elijah writes about chef and Los Angeles native Alvin Gates, who is new on his professional grind of being the private cook to the stars. Gates is an ambitious culinarian with a flair for Caribbean cooking and for promoting his cultural food roots in the West Indian diaspora. A couple of chance meetings has landed him in the kitchen of esteemed business executive, Jasmine Benjamin aka "Coco." Upon his hire, the FBI shows up, corners the young cook and squeezes him to become their eyes and ears on the inside of Coco’s operations. Why?

It was in the ivory towers of the Southwest that Elijah, who hails from Los Angeles, gained an aesthetic and a deepened appreciation for graphic narratives, experimental printing press forms, and writing for the screen. The four elements have combined to produce a novelist with an oddity for bringing food and the culinary arts at the forefront of fiction. With one book published about food as a benchmark for growing up (Chalkboard Specials, For Those Who Need Shelter Inside), he has become fascinated with pairing the alimentary with established genres. His next two festering manuscripts involve food as a setting for romance and a historical tale of food and its star players of industry, respectively. Food literature has also been something that inspires him to write what he writes, but there is not much of a market for meal-centric stories outside of nonfiction memoirs or cookbooks. Strangely, that infuriates him to write what he does, in an attempt to make a permanent nook in fiction for dishes and the interesting characters who need to eat them—to slay dragons and vanquish hordes of zombies.

Congratulations, Elijah! We are so proud to know you!