The way we tell stories is changing faster than ever. We’re not just flipping pages anymore – we’re tapping screens, attending virtual roundtables, and watching narratives unfold through digital innovation. Literary gatherings around the globe have become laboratories where tradition meets technology, where whispered poetry meets podcast workshops, and where emerging voices find their audience. These events aren’t just about selling books or meeting famous authors. They’re reshaping how stories get told and who gets to tell them.
Think about it. Every year, tens of thousands gather at festivals that look nothing like your grandfather’s book club. Some festivals now blend augmented reality with classic fiction workshops. Others host AI-driven storytelling sessions alongside memoir classes.
1. Future of StoryTelling Summit: Where Tech Meets Narrative
Summit is a two-day invitation-only gathering of around 500 leaders from business, media, technology, and the arts, featuring intimate speaker-led roundtables, hands-on workshops, and immersive exhibitions. Founded in 2012 by Charles Melcher, the organization produces content year-round including workshops, exhibitions, newsletters, and a bi-weekly podcast. This isn’t your typical literary event where people sit politely in auditorium chairs. Honestly, it feels more like a creative playground for grown-ups who believe stories can do more than entertain.
The summit produces films featuring leaders discussing interactive theater, immersive journalism, artificial intelligence, and the neuroscience of empathy. Past subjects have included Disney animators, filmmakers, and tech CEOs. Originally launched as a one-day event for 300 people, it expanded to a week-long summit and festival attracting nearly 6,000 participants, with roundtables, creative workshops, immersive performances, and exhibitions. The focus here is simple but radical: how can new technology make stories more powerful, more empathetic, more human?
2. Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: America’s Largest Literary Celebration
Since 1996, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has gathered writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians and emerging storytellers, and is now in its 30th year as the largest event of its kind in the United States. Picture this: hundreds of exhibitor booths sprawled across a university campus, indoor panels, outdoor readings, chef demonstrations, and thousands of people who just really love words. The festival takes place at the University of Southern California and attracts a wonderfully diverse crowd.
What makes this gathering truly special is its refusal to stay stuck in one lane. Sure, there are traditional author signings and literary panels. There are also musicians performing between sessions, filmmakers discussing adaptations, and interactive booths where kids can create their own stories. The festival proves that storytelling isn’t confined to one medium. It’s fluid, collaborative, and always evolving. If you want to see where mainstream American literature is headed, this is the place to be.
3. Bay Area Book Festival: Justice, Diversity, and Bold Voices
Since 2015, Bay Area Book Festival has featured the boldest and most brilliant literary voices in conversations about issues that matter, with a focus on justice and diversity, and as it enters its 12th year, it stands as both a cultural celebration and a critical gathering space where activists, authors, and audiences can unite around today’s most urgent issues and uplift marginalized voices. Held in downtown Berkeley, California, this two-day event has become a powerhouse for progressive literary discourse.
Let’s be real – not every book festival tackles tough social questions head-on. This one does. Panels here don’t shy away from examining systemic inequality, climate justice, or representation in publishing. The Bay Area Book Festival is one of America’s largest literary events, taking place across two days in downtown Berkeley. The crowd is engaged, informed, and hungry for stories that challenge the status quo. It’s where literature becomes activism, where reading becomes resistance.
4. International Digital Storytelling Conference: Stories for a Just Future
The 12th International Digital Storytelling Conference will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2025. Previous conferences focused on themes like “Radical Listening: Story Work for a Just Future” and “Storytelling for a Just Future: Rise Up! Reconnect. Rebuild. Recreate.” This isn’t about tech for tech’s sake. Digital storytelling here means giving voice to communities that traditional publishing often ignores.
The Digital Storytelling community worldwide has been working as story workers for almost four decades, fostering social justice and raising awareness of issues of concern, hoping to contribute to a world characterized by respect and equality for all. Workshops teach participants how to create personal narratives using video, audio, and digital platforms. Think refugees sharing migration stories, indigenous communities preserving oral histories, marginalized groups claiming space in the digital landscape. These conferences are changing who gets to be a storyteller.
5. Montclair Literary Festival: Intimate Conversations with Literary Giants
Succeed2gether launched the Montclair Literary Festival in 2017 to engage the entire community in a celebration of reading, books, and Montclair’s vibrant and diverse literary scene. The 2025 program included Isabel Allende, Colum McCann, Connie Chung, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Scott Turow, and many more celebrated authors. This New Jersey festival punches well above its weight class. How did a suburban community event attract such heavy hitters?
The answer lies in the festival’s commitment to thoughtful programming and genuine conversation. The Montclair Literary Festival is a community-wide event that aims to exchange ideas, inspire future literary works and engage with different points of view, working closely with the Montclair Public Library, Watchung Booksellers and local volunteers. Past festivals have featured Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, and Trevor Noah. The intimate setting allows for deeper discussions than massive arena events. Readers leave feeling they’ve actually connected with writers they admire, not just spotted them from 200 feet away.
6. Europeana Digital Storytelling Festival: Culture Meets Technology
Every year, the Europeana Initiative runs the Digital Storytelling Festival, an international event encouraging cultural heritage professionals, educators, creatives, and students from Europe and beyond to boost their storytelling skills and tell stories exploring culture, hoping to inspire participants to create connections between art, culture, history and the contemporary world. The two-day event of talks, showcases and hands-on workshops takes place online. I know it sounds crazy, but this virtual gathering feels just as vibrant as in-person events.
The third edition of the Online Creative Residency brings students and new professionals together with expert mentors in writing, digital animation, stop motion animation, social media, video, collage art, and 3D, with this year’s theme being food. In May through July 2024, 13 participants took part in the Online Creative Residency. The festival proves that geographical boundaries don’t have to limit creative collaboration. Cultural heritage gets reimagined through digital lenses, making ancient stories feel urgent and contemporary.
7. San Francisco Writers Conference: Craft, Commerce, and Community
The 20th Celebration of Craft, Commerce, and Community joined 100+ presenters and fellow writers from across the country and around the world, with events consistently rated among the top writers’ conferences anywhere. The 2024 conference featured over 100 presenters including 28 literary agents and acquiring editors, 80+ sessions over four days, a Poetry Summit, Writing for Hollywood Summit, free consultations with editors and book coaches, and networking social events. This conference doesn’t pretend that writers only care about art. They care about careers too.
Here’s the thing: most writers need to understand both the creative side and the business side. Presenters include best-selling authors, literary agents, acquiring editors, indie editors, publishers from major houses and small presses, plus experts on self-publishing, book promotion, platform building, social media, audiobooks, podcasting, and author websites, with one of the largest faculties of any writers conference. The vibe is practical but passionate. You’ll learn how to pitch your manuscript in the morning and attend a poetry reading in the evening. It’s a balance many conferences struggle to achieve.
8. International Digital Storytelling Festival Zakynthos: We, The Story
The 2nd International Digital Storytelling Festival-Zakynthos 2026 will take place in Zakynthos on October 2-4, 2026, following the 12th International Digital Storytelling Conference in Belém, Brazil, on November 6-8, 2025. The 1st International Digital Storytelling Festival celebrated the power of stories and the art of digital storytelling from September 27-29, 2024. Held on a Greek island, this festival combines stunning Mediterranean landscapes with cutting-edge digital narrative techniques.
Four Laboratories from three Greek Universities in collaboration with the UNESCO Club of Zakynthos organize the biannual International Digital Storytelling Festival held between the biannual International conferences. The setting matters. When you’re discussing how stories connect humanity, being in a place with thousands of years of storytelling tradition adds depth. Participants create digital stories exploring identity, community, and social change. The atmosphere blends ancient Greek narrative wisdom with 21st-century tools.
9. Emerging Writers Festival Melbourne: Platform for Fresh Voices
The Emerging Writers’ Festival is a not-for-profit organisation whose foundations are built on supporting emerging writers, nurturing new talent and celebrating new voices. The 2026 festival will run September 10-18, from Melbourne with events in the city, outer suburbs, interstate and broadcast online. In 2025, Emerging Writers’ Festival turns a new page with reimagined event formats and a program bursting with cross-disciplinary projects, community connection and bold creative energy, continuing its mission to platform fresh voices and provide inspirational ground for writers of all ages and career stages. This Australian festival isn’t interested in literary celebrities. It wants to discover tomorrow’s voices today.
Workshops here focus on craft, but also on building confidence and community. The festival provides transformative workshops, immersive conversations, powerful readings and time to simply write, be and share with fellow storytellers. Young writers – some still students, others just starting their careers – get mentorship, performance opportunities, and genuine encouragement. The energy is less polished than established festivals, which is precisely the point. Rough edges and experimental formats are celebrated, not smoothed away.
The Road Ahead
These ten gatherings represent something bigger than book sales or author appearances. They’re laboratories where storytelling evolves, where technology and tradition shake hands, where voices that were once silenced now command stages. Some focus on craft, others on community. Some embrace digital innovation, others preserve oral traditions. Together, they form an ecosystem nurturing the future of narrative.
What strikes me most about these events is their diversity of approach. There’s no single vision of what storytelling should become. Instead, multiple experiments run simultaneously – AI-assisted narratives here, social justice storytelling there, immersive exhibitions in one place, intimate poetry readings in another. The literary landscape is richer for it. Whether you’re a reader hungry for new perspectives or a writer searching for your community, one of these gatherings likely speaks to you.
So what’s your take on where storytelling is heading? Have you been to any of these festivals, or is there one calling your name? The future is being written right now, one gathering at a time.
