Francesca Penchant began her career in the 1990s at RE/Search Publications, a legendary San Francisco publisher of underground bibles such as Modern Primitives and Freaks. She is now a dark fiction book editor and publisher who teaches editing at the University of Washington, where she earned a certificate in Editing. She founded Rachilde & Co. Books, an independent press for which she designs books of decadent LGBTQ+ authors and themes from the nineteenth-century and beyond. Like her clients, Francesca is inspired by literature of the macabre such as gothic, horror, noir, thriller, mystery, crime, and decadent fictions—and has an innate knack for craft and style. A certified Author Accelerator book coach, Francesca also has an MFA specializing in book arts; her MFA thesis was Huysmans’s Á Rebours in cabinet form. Her crime novel, Maybe in Heaven (2025), combines Neo-Decadence with film noir.