Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD

The King's English is honored to host authors, Lisa Van Orman Hadley and Chloe Martinez to celebrate the release of their new book, Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD.

Tickets for this event are $5 and all proceeds go directly to our partner non-profit, Brain Food Books.

Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event. You may also pre-order your signed copy of their books to be picked up at the event by either calling the store at 801-484-9100 or ordering online. If you cannot make this event, signed copies may be ordered from our website. Please specify in the comments if you would like your copy personalized.

Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy from The King's English.

About the Book

Fifteen essays that offer inspiration, encouragement, and advice from accomplished writers with ADHD.

A rising number of ADHD diagnoses, particularly among adults, is not only confirmed by medical studies and mainstream reporting but also borne out across social media and elsewhere among people who’d been privately coping with persistent, often inexpressible challenges. Many of the contributors to this collection can attest to how a later-in-life diagnosis radically demystified the patterns, impulses, and impasses that had affected their lives and their writing. The essays in Chaos, Creativity, Completion reflect the ways poets, novelists, memoirists, filmmakers, and others have come to understand and engage the relationship between their ADHD and their creative tool kits.

These essays consider how writers can embrace rather than mask their neurodifference, offering multiple ways of finding writing practices that work for ADHD brains—including techniques that often look quite different from traditional writing instruction. Some essays are analytical, some are reflective, and some are delightfully weird, employing humor, research, personal narrative, deep description, close reading, and experimental approaches to genre and form. Each essay also concludes with a writing prompt, providing readers with opportunities to expand their own creative toolkits. Finally, the book includes an interview with David Kessler, a licensed therapist and nationally recognized ADHD advocate, and an appendix with a glossary of helpful terms and a list of recommended resources, from books and organizations to apps and gadgets.

Just as the experience of ADHD varies from person to person, so, too, do the ways those experiences can be expressed. Chaos, Creativity, Completion is a kaleidoscopic, adventurous series of takes on what writing looks like today.

About the Authors

Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian Religions. She is the author of the poetry collections Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020); coeditor, with Lisa Van Orman Hadley, of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD (University of Chicago Press, 2026); and translator of Blue Like My Beloved: Poems of Mirabai (New Directions, 2026). She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Lisa Van Orman Hadley is the author of Irreversible Things (Howling Bird Press, 2018), which was awarded the Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize, the AML Special Award in Literature, two Midwest Book Awards silver medals, the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant. She is the coeditor of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD (University of Chicago, 2026) with Chloe Martinez. Her stories have appeared in New England Review, the Collagist, and Epoch and have been shortlisted in Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. She works as a freelance editor and lives in Salt Lake City.

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