Book Talk: Looking for Frank Wills with Wesley Brown

Join us for a discussion of Wesley Brown's historical fiction novel, Looking for Frank Wills!

Welsey will be joined in conversation by radio host and author Quincy McCoy. Q&A and book signing to follow discussion!

About the Book

"Wesley Brown is looking for the truths and lies of history, and, as always, exploring the complexities of Black life in America. What he he finds has the wondrous precision and subtlety of a Thelonious Monk composition"

--Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

It's 1972. Tricky Dick is in office, James Brown is on the radio, and Wayne Beasley reluctantly presides over the comings and goings of his barbers and patrons at Wayne's Clip and Trim in Augusta, South Carolina.

When one of Wayne's former customers, an unassuming small-town son, is designated 4-F, unfit to serve in Vietnam, he seeks refuge in becoming the next best thing--a security guard for a downtown DC hotel. It is there on a hot summer's night, that Wayne's wayward patron interrupts a break-in that will disrupt the course of a nation's history and his own.

Wesley Brown, author of Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, and Blue in Green: A Novella, once again remaps the tributaries that run into the stream of our American subconscious, by dipping into the headwaters of pivotal memories and histories to tell the tale from the perspective of the real folks whose stories were too long submerged. Without Frank Wills there is no Watergate. And without Watergate the veil of secrecy and corruption that came to define the Nixon years, warping the very fabric of political discourse from that moment on, would have remained firmly in place. Wesley Brown's re-imagining of the life of Frank Wills reconciles the greatest heist of all--our place in the American story.

What was stolen from Wills as he was briefly thrust into the spotlight, while excluded from the annals of history, is reclaimed, as Brown gives voice and breath to the people who loved him and the barber who did his best to guide him.

Wesley Brown is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, a novella, and five plays. He is professor emeritus in English at Rutgers University and a former visiting professor in the Arts Division at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. He wrote the narration for a segment of the 1997 PBS documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices, has held visiting writer residencies in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is co-editor of The Methuen Drama Anthology of American Women Playwrights: 1970–2020. A new edition of his first novel, Tragic Magic, was published, as a part of the Of the Diaspora series, by McSweeney’s in 2021. He lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Quincy McCoy has spent most of his life in radio and music—from programming major-market stations and serving as a music executive to writing about the industry to helping digital media take its early steps as VP of Digital Music for MTV. Along the way, he received a Peabody Award for Broadcasting. His classic industry book, No Static: A Guide to Creative Radio Programming, has remained a foundational text for more than twenty-five years.