Friday August 6, 2010 marked the day of SPEAKout Summer Slam, but it was not like any of the past events. Held in the Royal Ontario Museum, located in the heart of Toronto, 13 of the country’s top poets, including SPEAKout’s previous winners, joined to compete for $800 1st place cash prize. The competition was not easy, as our judges and audience soon discovered. Read more

Held at Kitchener’s award winning City Hall, and as a part of the Global Citizenship Conference (GCC), SPEAKout’s third event “Breaking the Culture of Silence” was a standing-room only sold-out event with over 200 attendees from around Canada. Poets came from Saskatchewan, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Waterloo to compete in a night that left the audience spellbound. Read more

Originally organized for UTM’s ‘Xpression Against Oppression’ week, SPEAKout went ahead with the event anyways despite a last minute decision to host the ‘XAO’ week in the winter instead. So on Nov. 20th, 2009, UTM’s South Building was host to some tough and poetic social critic as issues of social justice, multiculturalism, women’s rights and freedom among others were on full display thanks to the poets’ artful arsenal of lyrical ammunition. Read more

SPEAKout’s first event held in the Rogers Communication Centre on July 24th, 2009. The event revealed what the SPEAKout team had believed in all along: Toronto has tons of local super talent that ought to be exposed. 11 young up and coming poets competed from around the GTA with Raywat Deonandan (Ottawa University Professor, author and arts philanthropist), and Phero (local hip-hop artist) providing live critique. Read more