BUDDY WAKEFIELD is an actor, writer, producer, and three-time world champion spoken word artist. In 2004 he won the first Individual World Poetry Slam Finals and then went on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world in over 2000 venues.
Buddy has been a busker in Amsterdam, 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 notably slow triathlete, a facilitator at Quantum Learning Network, and is the most toured performance poet in history. 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, then set out to live for a living. His aim was to tour North American poetry venues for two years. He did not stop. He is the founder of Awful Good Writers, and the producer and host of Heavy Hitters Festival 2020, a summer-long series of online shows and workshops featuring thirty of the most beloved performance poets alive.
Wakefield, who isn’t concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart.
In her book, Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, New York Times best-selling author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz named Wakefield “the modern poetry slam role model.” She wrote, “…[Wakefield] sold everything he owned and toured the country, living out of his car when he wasn’t crashing on couches. He was not the first slam poet to do this and certainly not the last, but he was definitely the most high-profile, and he really set the stage for what I like to call the ‘Troubadour Movement’ in slam, the whole desire simply to tour, to reach out and be with your community.”
