The Visiting Author Series at Petals & Pages Presents:Chloé Caldwell

The Visiting Author Series at Petals & Pages presents Chloé Caldwell, author of the cult-classic novella Women and new memoir, Trying. Chloé will be joined in conversation with Mia Arias Tsang, author of Fragments of Wasted Devotion.

CHLOÉ CALDWELL is the author of the national bestseller, Women (Harper Perennial, 2024). Chloé’s next book, Trying, is forthcoming from Graywolf, on August 5th, 2025. She is also the author of the books I’ll Tell You In Person (2016), The Red Zone (2022), and Legs Get Led Astray (2012).

Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Vice, Longreads, Nylon, The Rumpus, The Sun, and half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC and Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, and Sluts.

She has been on faculty at Writing Workshops Paris, Writing Workshops Iceland, Chautauqua Institute, Fine Arts Work Center, Write or Die Tribe, Catapult, Litreactor, Gotham Writer’s Workshop, and Corporeal Writing.

Chloé lives in Hudson, New York. She is represented by Rebecca Gradinger and Laurie-Maude Chenard of United Talent Agency. She is the co-founder of Scrappy Literary where she runs writing retreats and offers personalized support for writers. IG: @chloeeeecaldwell

From the author of the best-selling Women, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page . . . until she extracted a confession from her husband.Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candor, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell’s work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming—and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.

MIA ARIAS TSANG is a writer and freelance editor based in New York City. Her work explores themes of queer desire, intimacy, and disconnect. Her work has appeared in Copy, Autostraddle, Half Mystic Press, Fatal Flaw Magazine, and Broad Recognition Magazine, among others. She is a copy editor for the literary magazine Identity Theory and program coordinator at the literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy, and writes a newsletter called Overripe Peach. She lives in Queens with her cat, Peanut, and is currently working on a novel. Fragments of Wasted Devotion is her first book.

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