Stories of the Future Panel
"Stories of the Future: Visions of Reading and Authoring in a Digital World" is hosted by Istoria.io and Alexandria Labs (alexandrialabs.xyz) and features authors, poets, innovators, and builders.
Here's our line-up of literary superstars:
Iain S. Thomas (@RealIainSThomas)
Iain S. Thomas has dozens of local and international awards for his creativity and is one of the world’s most popular writers and poets, with millions of readers across the globe. His prose and poetry appears on monuments and in university collections, has been quoted by everyone from Steven Spielberg to Arianna Huffington, and has been read in front of the British Royal Family.
Christian Bök (@ChristianBok)
Christian Bök is a bestselling Canadian poet. His collections of poetry include Crystallography, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Eunoia, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its chapters, which received the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. In his Xenotext experiment, he is creating "a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem." Bök is also a sound poet and conceptual artist who has produced numerous artist's books, including books made entirely of Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. Additionally, he has invented languages for the science-fiction television shows Earth: Final Conflict and Amazon.
Ana Maria Caballero (@CaballeroAnaMa), theVERSEverse
Ana Maria Caballero's writing has won the Beverly International Prize for Literature, Colombia's José Miguel Arango National Poetry Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her digital poems were displayed at Dreamverse in NYC, won a Sevens Foundation grant, and were featured by MOCDA. She is a co-founder of theVERSEverse.com, a literary gallery where poems are works of art.
Jay Rosenkrantz (@jayrosenkrantz), Heroic Story
Jay Rosenkrantz is building Heroic Story, an epic playground for writers, artists, and collectors to experience the web 3 story economy. He's co-founder of Wordloops, an online world made to help writers build habits and improve their skills, and Figments, virtual characters with fictional storylines who play esports. In a past life, he was a renowned professional poker player.
Leia Ruseva (@leia_ruseva), On Deck
Leia Ruseva is the co-founder of EllisX, an award-winning startup building a better future for creators and startups alike. Her writing on startups, marketing and the creator economy has been featured in Built In, the Boston Business Journal and Hacker Noon. She also serves as a marketing expert for On Deck's accelerator, ODX, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Open Avenues, a Boston-based non-profit that harnesses foreign talent to create opportunities for underrepresented students in the US.
Katie Mishra (@KatieRuthMishra), Kangaroo Interactive
Katie Mishra co-founded Kangaroo to create a new category of metaverse storytelling. Kangaroo has developed a mobile gaming platform for celebrities, franchises, and NFT projects to create community-driven interactive online stories for their fan bases. Fans play canon series about partners, and then use the series' assets and moments to expand the partner's universe with their own stories. Kangaroo has done an alpha launch with co-founder Kiernan Shipka, and is launching soon with additional well-known partners. Besides Kangaroo, Katie has a background in self-publishing books, studying at Stanford CS, and doing SWE internships at Meta AI.
Sonia Joseph (@SoniaJoseph_), Alexandria Labs
Sonia Joseph is co-founder and CEO of Alexandria Labs, bringing books to the metaverse. She is an AI researcher and memoirist and believes in building civilization-scale projects.
Tagan Horton (@thetagan), Opera Sneaker, Kernel
Tagan is a storyteller and designer across media. She works at the intersection of storytelling and community, with film projects, podcasts, and accelerators supporting entrepreneurship around the world. Her most recent work is focused on NFTs and Digital Art curation, creating unique and cutting edge experiments that bridge the digital and physical.