Francesca Penchant is a dark fiction book editor and publisher who teaches editing at the University of Washington. Discovering Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891) in a used bookshop in San Francisco in 1993 consummated decadent literature’s hold over her. 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. A certified Author Accelerator book coach, Francesca also has an MFA specializing in book arts and design; her MFA thesis was Huysmans’s Á Rebours in cabinet form. Her crime novel, Maybe in Heaven (2025), combines film noir with Neo-Decadence.