In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Wesley Brown about how novella, Looking for Frank Wills (McSweenys, 2026).
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 an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and teacher. He worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1965 and became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968. In 1972, he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent eighteen months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. For twenty-six years, Brown was a much-revered professor at Rutgers University, where he inspired hundreds of students. He currently teaches literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock and lives in Chatham, New York.

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