Buddy Wakefield: Riled Up and Wasted On Light

Join us for Buddy Wakefield's 2014-15 World Tour: Riled Up and Wasted On Light

About Buddy Wakefield:

Buddy Wakefield is a three-time world champion spoken word artist featured on the BBC, ABC Radio National, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR and most recently signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. In 2004 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals thanks to the support of anthropologist and producer Norman Lear then successfully defended that title at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands against the national champions of seven European countries with works translated into Dutch.

In 2005 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship again and has gone on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world in 2000+ venues internationally from The Great Lawn of Central Park, Zimbabwe’s Shoko Festival and Scotland’s Oran Mor to San Quentin State Penitentiary, House of Blues New Orleans and The Basement in Sydney, Australia.

In the spring of 2001 Buddy left his position as the executive assistant at a biomedical firm in Gig Harbor, WA, sold or gave away everything he owned, moved to the small town of Honda Civic and set out to live for a living, touring North American poetry venues through 2003. He still tours full time.

Born in Shreveport, LA, mostly raised in Baytown, TX, now claiming Seattle, WA as home, Buddy has been a busker in Amsterdam, a lumberjack in Norway, a street vendor in Spain, a team leader in Singapore, a re-delivery boy, a candy maker, a street sweeper, a bartender, a maid, a construction worker, a bull rider, a triathlete and a facilitator at Quantum Learning Networks. He loves peanut butter, chopping wood, Vipassana and two specific geese, The Colonel and Mrs. Marple. Wakefield is a writer, the elated son of a guitar repair woman, wingman of Giant Saint Everything, and remembers Kirkwood, NY. Sanborn too.

Buddy, an author at Write Bloody Publishing, a queer activist and an original Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle, is published internationally in dozens of books with work used to win multiple national collegiate debate and forensics competitions. Wakefield, who is not concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart.