Darren LaCour teaches music theory at Lindenwood University and Washington University in St. Louis and occasionally serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Webster University. He writes on jazz, race, and culture, primarily concerning the music of Duke Ellington. Though he was born in the New Orleans area, he considers his main authority on the city to be gastronomic.
Rich manages to capture the messiness of the human experience, having his characters live in the gray moral reality rather than the black-and-white dichotomies presented in the abstract.