Jamie DeWolf

Jamie DeWolf (born Jamie Kennedy, 1977) is an American slam poet and spoken word comedian from Oakland, California, USA. DeWolf is a critically acclaimed writer, poet, editor, producer, photographer, and director. He is best known for his work with the slam poetry trio The Suicide Kings, hosting Tourettes Without Regrets at the Oakland Metro OperaHouse, and for his work as a producer on NPR's Snap Judgment. DeWolf has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry. DeWolf directed, wrote and starred in the 2012 feature film Smoked. The Movie.

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 filmmaker, DeWolf wrote and directed two feature films: Absolutely Badass and Smoked. The Movie, the later of which has been accepted into film festivals internationally. 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 entitled 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.

Family
Formerly Jamie Kennedy, DeWolf took his mother's maiden name in 2006 to avoid confusion with actor and fellow comedian Jamie Kennedy (born May 25, 1970). DeWolf is the great-grandson of L. Ron Hubbard; being the grandson of Hubbard's son Ronald DeWolf. DeWolf told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001 that his mother and girlfriend were visited by Scientology agents, who asked about his comments on Scientology in his poetry and his appearance at a November 2000 benefit for the Lisa McPherson Trust in Clearwater, Florida. The poetry piece was titled: "Judas' Son". Initially, the Scientology agents told DeWolf's mother that they were fellow poets, but DeWolf later remarked: "My mom knew from the moment they started talking that they were Scientologists, which they admitted to." DeWolf was quoted as saying: "They can't shut me up."

Views on Scientology
Of his own views on Scientology and his great-grandfather, DeWolf remarked in the East Bay Express: "Scientology is the most brilliantly engineered pyramid scam I've ever seen. L. Ron Hubbard -- you can never say that he was an idiot, by any means. He was very intelligent, very sort of evil, malicious; a sort of overman, his will against the world."

In a January 25, 2013 interview with Cenk Uygur on Current TV, DeWolf stated that Scientology "works through a lot of hodgepodge of ideas thrown together with this extremely brutal sort of security sense and this kind of like CIA-like structure that becomes really intoxicating to people. But to meet people who’ve been out of the cult — I mean, yeah, you want to ask them about Xenu and aliens — but the fact is these are smart people. They’ve just been completely destroyed."