The Words Aloud Spoken Word and Storytelling Festival is a small but mighty regional event held in the southwestern Ontario village of Durham (pop. 2500), about an hour-and-a-half north of Guelph. Co-founded in 2004 by Liz Zetlin and Dawna Proudman, in response to a suggestion from Durham Art Gallery curator and executive director Ilse Gassinger, for the last twelve years the festival’s mandate has been to showcase the spoken word in all its stylistic and cultural diversity. It does this by way of a revolving roster of coordinators, artistic directors and volunteers who maintain the festival’s basic structure while venturing into new programming territory every year. Since there are many opportunities for local poets to read locally, the emphasis in Words Aloud has been to bring in accomplished, diverse, professional practitioners of poetry and spoken word, to inspire, educate, and widen audiences’ understanding of these literary practices

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