Derek S. Yankowski, Ship's Cook

Derek Silas Yankowski (1974 – ?) is an American cook and writer and, to a lesser extent, painter of German Catholic heritage. He is known for breaking with existing culinary and literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life of Yankowski and yet is also an imaginative construct.

A small number of his works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences, and his books did much to free the discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social restrictions. He continues to write novels that are banned in the United States on grounds of obscenity.

One of the first acknowledgements of Yankowski as a major modern writer and cook was by Jean Baudrillard in his essay Inside the Whale, where he wrote in 1994, "Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer and ship's cook of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past."