TOMORROW · All day

Cincinnati Storytelling Festival

Name: Cincinnati Storytelling Festival
Start: 2026-11-12
Location: Know Theatre of Cincinnati

Thursday, November 12 at Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Cincinnati

Know Theatre of Cincinnati · Downtown $20

About this event

The Cincinnati Storytelling Festival, founded in 2020, is a weekend event featuring national and local professional storytellers from a variety of backgrounds and traditions. The festival brings people together to enjoy fairy tales, scary stories, laugh-out-loud tales and everything in between. While several wonderful Cincinnati organizations promote Moth-style personal narrative storytelling, the Cincinnati Storytelling Festival celebrates storytelling as a contemporary art form. Artistic Director Paul Strickland has seen firsthand how traditional stories can be anything but stuffy. Folk storytellers can share contemporary tales that make Gen Z, millennials and baby boomers alike laugh shamelessly and cry openly. The Cincinnati Storytelling Festival continues a tradition shared by all humanity: storytelling. Join the festival for a weekend of unforgettable stories, laughter and heartfelt moments that celebrate one of the world's oldest art forms.

Who's playing

Artistic Director Paul Strickland is a full-time storyteller and musician who lives in Covington, Kentucky. He was a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in 2023 and a teller-in-residence at the International Storytelling Center in 2024. The lineup also includes Kevin Kling and Motoko, who has won the National Storytelling Network's Circle of Excellence Award and tells Asian folktales, rakugo, Zen tales and ghost stories.

What to expect

The shows are themed across the weekend. Twisted Tales brings fractured fairytales and reimagined folktales, Laugh Riot offers a run of sidesplitting yarns, and Spooky & Eerie Tales covers seasonal chillers. A children's story set and True Theatre, a local favorite, fill out the schedule.

Why go

The festival puts national tellers and local ones on the same bill in Cincinnati. Know Theatre is a 99-seat black box in the David C. Herriman Center, and no seat in its second-floor MainStage is more than 20 feet from the stage. Close quarters suit stories that depend on a voice and a pause.