Jamie de Wolf - Career

Career

DeWolf began performing in 1997 in his hometowns of Benicia and Vallejo and he eventually branched out and created Tourettes Without Regrets in 1999. Since then, the show has become the longest-running freestyle battle and the largest slam on the West Coast. It was awarded the “Best of the Bay” by the SF Guardian multiple times and continues every first Thursday of the month in Oakland, CA. His work has been well received; in 2001 the San Francisco Chronicle characterized DeWolf as "a nationally recognized slam poet".

Since his first slam in 1999, DeWolf (formerly known as Jamie Kennedy) has won his way onto seven slam teams every year he has competed and has since become a National Poetry Slam Champion, the Oakland and Berkeley Grand Slam Champion, a YouthSpeaks Mentor, a featured performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and has performed and led writing workshops at over 90 universities, high schools and juvenile detention centers across the globe. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, UPN and NPR. As a member of The Suicide Kings performance trio (with Geoff Trenchard and Rupert Estanislao), he has toured the country and in 2006 received the National Performance Network Creation Commission to write In Spite of Everything, described as ”a poignant, chilling knockout of a play that beautifully incorporates their visceral verse into the brutal narrative to a school shooting.” The play premiered at the Hip Hop Theater Festival in 2007 and was chosen as one of the “top ten” plays of the year by East Bay Express the same year.

As a film-maker, he is the writer and director of the shorts Safe, Chasing Charlamagne, Hickman Homes: Certified Beasts, Ricochet in Reverse. He has released an EP with poetry, music, and recorded clips of his family's history Vaude Villain and has begun work on his next two screenplays.

As the great grandson of the Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, he remains a vocal critic of Scientology on national radio, and was the host of the first anti-Scientology summit in Clearwater, Florida. He currently resides in Oakland, CA.