Francesco Parisi doesn’t know what inspired his love for creating stories, but it’s been with him since before he could read. As a toddler, he spent hours spinning yarns with his grandma, and while he doesn’t remember those tales, she says that Mr. Planter Peanut and a boy and girl named Joey and Solota were recurring characters. Francesco’s earliest written works were done in crayon, marker, or whatever else lay around, and many of them reside in a box that he keeps in his closet to this day.

By the end of third grade, Francesco knew he wanted to be an author when he grew up, but until then reading had been a chore. Ironically, it was only thanks to his school’s Accelerated Reader program turning reading into mandatory homework that he developed a love of it. Discovering books like Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Nancy Drew, and countless others gave him an eclectic set of tastes, and though he eventually settled on fantasy as his favorite genre, there are very few he won’t occasionally write in (and even fewer he won’t read).

From third through sixth grade, he was one of two students in his class selected to attend the district’s Young Authors Fair, where published writers spoke about the profession, and typing, formatting, and binding stories for the event gave him an early taste of the industry. Over the next several years he started dozens of projects in a wide range of genres and even won a local high-school poetry contest in ninth grade. It would take until the summer before his junior year to finish drafting his first full novel in 2014, and three more followed before he graduated from college in 2020. All four needed total rewrites, but one of them marked his first time pitching to agents from late 2016 to early 2017.

Knowing what he wanted from life, Francesco majored in English with a creative writing emphasis at Fresno Pacific University starting in 2016. In his sophomore year he got a creative nonfiction piece published in the university literary journal, The Green Light, followed by a fantasy short story in his junior year. As a senior, he had the privilege of being editor-in-chief. He also interned in the university’s editing department, where he gained experience as a journalist, and that led to his first paid writing gigs as a freelance writer for the alumni department. After graduation, he got a poem and another fantasy story published in The Green Light and continued writing for the alumni department.