Every other year the International Conference on the Short Story in English brings together writers and scholars with an interest in the short story, creating an unusual forum for a fruitful debate between the practitioners of the art and critical readers, coming from a diversity of fields and sharing a variety of interests.

Writers and readers, bound by their common love for the short story, convene from all over the world. They are interested in exploring the ways and byways of an art that interconnects with other forms of literature as well as with other fields of art (namely photography, painting, cinema, music, and others). They also approach and discuss the variety of ways in which the short story is (and has been) embodied in history and geography, exploring the multiple interweaving links of production and consumption of literary works with the social, political, economic, and other issues relevant to a given time and place.

Attendees have come from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Countries represented include Argentina, Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, the Canary Islands, England, Ethiopia, France, Guyana, India, Jamaica, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, and the United States.