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, Anthony Bansfield, RC Weslowski, and Dwayne Morgan, who received support from the Canada Council for the Arts to organize a national showcase of spoken word talent in Canada.
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 festival also honoured the poetic contributions of acclaimed African-Canadian poet and playwright George Elliott Clarke.
However, the event was renamed the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in its second year because of concerns about copyright conflict with the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
The 2005 festival organizing committee, led by Randy Jacobs / RC Weslowski, took the opportunity to broaden the focus of the event.
Groves, and Kim Shaughnessy, took the finals win, retaining the championship for the home city for the second year in a row.
The festival also included open mic sessions, panel discussions and guerrilla poetry readings on the streets of Halifax.
The Spoken Word Canada Board of Directors selected Victoria as the 2009 host city at its annual meeting.
In a tense and closely contested final slam, Halifax became the second city in the history of CFSW to repeat as champions, narrowly defeating Toronto's Up From the Roots team.
At finals night, Montreal, Vancouver and the Wildcard Team known as the Slaughterhouse Four were unable to prevent The Recipe (Ottawa) from claiming the championship for the first time.
The organizing committee, formed largely from members of the Capital Poetry Collective, was led by festival director Nathanaël Larochette.
There was also a Last Chance Slam on the first day of the festival to select a Wild Card Team composed of five storm poets.
Toronto was confirmed as the 2011 host in advance of the annual Spoken Word Canada Board of Directors meeting held during the festival.
At the same meeting, Saskatoon was confirmed as the 2012 host city and the community of Kitchener-Waterloo was added to the Board, making them eligible to send a team to the 2011 festival.
It was also the first officially bilingual festival in which poets were requested to have at least one poem translated into French to promote the guiding theme of language diversity.