Canadian Festival of Spoken Word

The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word is an annual festival produced by Spoken Word Canada and planned by a local Festival Organizing Committee in each host city.

The inaugural festival took place in Ottawa, Ontario in 2004 and was then known as the Canadian Spoken Wordlympics. CFSW has since become the flagship event for poetry slam in Canada, and is evolving to better represent the full spectrum of spoken word nationally.

The Canadian Spoken Wordlympics as an organization was created in 2003 by Darek Dawda and Anthony Bansfield who received support from the Canada Council for the Arts to organize a national showcase of spoken word talent in Canada. They saw the success of the National Poetry Slam in the United States and envisioned a similar poetry slam event for Canada drawing national and international attention. The founders of the festival decided the first event should be held in Ottawa in fall 2004. An organizing team was pulled together and another large successful application was made to the Canada Council for the Arts for financial support for the four-day event.

The inaugural festival, led by Darek Dawda and Oni Joseph, was held at the National Library and Archives in October 2004, and featured several poetry slams held in the evenings, with showcase events and open mics in the afternoons. Several poets from international locations such as France, the U.S., Germany, and the United Kingdom also participated in various facets of the festival. Showcases for women, Aboriginal peoples, urban poets, queer poets and youth were held, and there was a guerrilla reading on the front lawn of the Parliament buildings.

The festival also honoured the poetic contributions of acclaimed African-Canadian poet and playwright George Elliott Clarke.

Slam teams representing Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax and Winnipeg participated in the first team championship competition, with the Vancouver 1 team of Shane Koyczan, C.R. Avery, Barbara Adler and Brendan McLeod emerging victorious. Brendan McLeod and Drek Daa tied for the title of the individual slam competition champion, thereby becoming to date the only persons ever crowned Canadian Individual Slam Champions.

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