Francesca Schmidt was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1991. She has been writing poetry since childhood. While attending the Fine Arts Center of Greenville in high school, she learned about a strict poetic structure called the sestina. "Beauty in the Eye" is a compilation of autobiographic sestinas that Francesca has written. It is, by no means, a sequel to her previous publication, "The Smell of New Leather," but rather a different outlook on her life. She writes this book from the perspective of a reflective, married, Catholic woman and tells another side of the story of her life.