Wesley Brown: Blue in Green
Book release reading and celebration
“One hell of a writer”
—James Baldwin
“Wonderfully wry”
—Donald Barthelme
“[A] writer’s writer”
—Ishmael Reed
The Word Is Change is thrilled to welcome Wesley Brown upon the publication of his new novel Blue in Green.
A former Black Panther and political prisoner, Wesley Brown’s first novel Tragic Magic, was edited by Toni Morrison and published to great acclaim. His latest novel, Blue in Green (Blank Forms, 2022), narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland.
In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’s temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her strict upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his Ferrari. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.
Wesley Brown will be joined by Simeon Marsalis author of As Lie Is to Grin and a member of Lampblack.
“Blue in Green is a gorgeous jazz composition…. When I closed the book, I wanted to begin it all over again: see, hear, and re-experience every note of Wesley Brown’s wonderful prose music.”
—Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System and Negroland: A Memoir
"As he writes about Miles and Lady Day in Blue in Green, Wesley Brown does more 'with less.' In this concise novella he renders the music and the musicians with intelligence, depth, clarity, and beautiful wisdom. An extra bonus: though it is a story of Miles, Frances, fully imagined, finally gets her due. Blue in Green is a true gift from a great writer."
—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature
Wesley Brown (born 1945) is a novelist and playwright. He is the author of novels including Darktown Strutters, Push Comes to Shove and Tragic Magic, which was reissued in 2021 to critical acclaim. He has led an active political life, having held memberships in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he spent more than a year in federal prison for refusing induction in the armed services during the Vietnam War. In this time, he drafted his first novel, which was edited by Toni Morrison. He is a professor emeritus of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he taught for 26 years. Brown lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
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