Arts and Humanities

Twinless Twin: The Story of a Novel
Dean Tuck
5:30 p.m. in WCC’s Moffatt Auditorium
[WCC Faculty Spotlight]

Dean Marshall Tuck will be reading a selection from his debut novel, Twinless Twin. The book follows a family, devastated by a troubled, enigmatic son’s unspeakable actions that have left them reeling, torn between moving on and searching for answers. Largely set in the foothills of an unnamed mountain, this insular landscape breeds rumor, legend, daydreams, and a mystery that runs deeper than the family who inhabits its woods. After the reading, Tuck will discuss how the book came to be—from conception to publication and the rocky road between.

Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer and educator from Bailey, North Carolina. His novel Twinless Twin (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2025) was chosen by Jason Mott as the winner of AWP’s 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. Tuck’s poetry and prose can be found in various literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Rattle. Tuck has taught writing at WCC since 2012 and serves as co-editor of the college’s creative writing and art magazine Renaissance. He also serves on the advisory board for North Carolina Literary Review. His wife, Deniz, is also an English instructor at the college.

To read his writing, please visit www.deanmarshalltuck.com.

Chris and Taylor Malpass with David Weil
5:30 p.m. in WCC’s Moffatt Auditorium

Join us for a special evening with Goldsboro’s own Chris and Taylor Malpass of The Malpass Brothers interviewed by David Weil. Mr. Weil is a devoted community leader and owner of Weil Enterprises. He has known them for many years, and he will ask about their journey to fame from their start in music to now. Known as “modern-day troubadours who carry the torch for traditional country music,” they have many fans here at home and across the country.

The Malpass Brothers began singing and playing together professionally at a very young age with their dad, Chris Malpass Sr. They studied  traditional sounds such as  the brother-harmony bluegrass duos of Jim & Jesse, the Louvin and Wilburn Brothers, and the sounds of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Charlie Pride, and Merle Haggard.

Starting in Eastern North Carolina, they have risen in popularity to have a full docket of concerts including spending seven years opening for Merle Haggard. The band has also performed nearly forty times at the Grand Ole Opry since they first appeared in 2018. Their television show, The Malpass Brothers Show, debuted on RFD-TV in 2024 and will begin filming Season Three this November.

In 2011,  Merle Haggard produced The Malpass Brothers’ debut album, Memory That Bad, on Hag Records. Since then, other producers released  several albums: The Malpass Brothers (2015), LIVE at the Paramount Theater (Heading Home) (2017),  and Lonely Street (2023).  Their most recent project is with Gaither Music for a gospel album that will be released in early 2026.

Eavesdropping on Animals
Eleanor Spicer Rice
5:30 p.m. in WCC’s Moffatt Auditorium

The animals around you can do some weird things. Your dogs spin around before going to the bathroom. Your cats seem to blink meaningfully into your eyes. Worms wriggle around after it rains, and your pet goldfish can seem like it’s . . . watching you? It turns out the wild world around us has some amazing experiences that we can’t see unless we know how to look. Together, we will decode some of our most familiar creatures’ strangest behaviors featured in her book series Your Hidden Life.

A Goldsboro native and lover of all things Wayne County, Eleanor Spicer Rice, PhD, has written more than ten books about the natural world, from telling the secrets of the ants on your countertops to revealing the hidden microbes secretly controlling our bodies. She is the writer and host of Our State Magazine’s “North Carolina, Naturally” series, a regular guest on various National Public Radio programs and podcasts, including Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, as well as on Discovery and Science Channel shows, including What on Earth? Her work has appeared and been reviewed in many publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, and Scientific American. She lives in Raleigh with her husband, two sons, dogs, gecko, tortoise, and a small flock of homing pigeons.

A North Carolina Doughboy’s Story
Joby Warrick
5:30 p.m. in WCC’s Moffatt Auditorium
[Veteran’s Day Tribute]

Just 52 years after the end of the Civil War, young men from Wayne County were called upon to serve their country in the trenches of France in what became known as World War I. Hundreds answered the call, including at least 54 soldiers, sailors, and Marines who did not return home.  Best-selling author and Wayne County native Joby Warrick embarked on a personal journey to retrace the steps of one of those soldiers, a great uncle who joined the Marines and was killed in action nine days before the war ended.

Many families back home knew little about the experiences of the North Carolinians who fought in the Great War, and few today understand the important role those battles played in shaping the country’s destiny. With words and photos, the author presents an astonishing tale of heroism by veterans who were part of nearly every major U.S. engagement of the war. The journey, chronicled in two major articles published in The Washington Post, led to surprising discoveries about the sacrifices of young men who fought and died a century ago, as well the impact on loved ones on the home front.

Joby Warrick, a native of Goldsboro, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of four nonfiction books. He served for nearly three decades as a national security reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Middle East and terrorism and reporting from scores of cities around the world. His books include The Triple Agent (Doubleday, 2011), a New York Times best seller about a CIA operation in Afghanistan, as well as Black Flags (Doubleday, 2015), a narrative account of the personalities and events that gave rise to the Islamic State, or ISIS. Black Flags won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and was listed by multiple critics as a “best book” of 2015. His latest book, a re-telling of the story of international super-terrorist Carlos the Jackal, will be published in the spring.

North America’s Ancient Cities and the Rise of a More Egalitarian Order
Kathleen DuVal
5:30 p.m. in WCC’s Moffatt Auditorium
[William S. Brettmann Lecture]

A millennium ago, all across North America, there were centralized civilizations with powerful leaders and large cities that rivaled urban centers around the world. Then, following a period of instability, smaller Native nations emerged, moving away from urbanization. They built more sustainable economies and more egalitarian political structures. Europeans saw these Native nations as primitive, but in fact, they were highly advanced consensus democracies that served their people better than the centralized civilizations had.

A history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Kathleen DuVal is a Guggenheim Fellow and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May of this year.  She also wrote Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution and the U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty! She has published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, The Atlantic, Time magazine, and the New York Times, and she is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. DuVal received her PhD at the University of California, Davis in 2001. Her research focuses on early America, particularly how various Native American, European, and African women and men interacted from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries.