February 14, 2020

John Rich’s work focuses on one of the nation’s most ignored and underserved populations: African American men in urban settings. In 2006, Rich received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for designing “new models of health care that stretch across the boundaries of public health, education, social service, and justice systems to engage young men in caring for themselves and their peers.”

Currently a professor of health management and policy at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, Rich co-directs, with his life partner Ted Corbin, the school’s Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice. Earlier, Rich served as medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and as a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center.

In 2009, Rich published Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men. An account of his conversations in the 1990s with young black men who had arrived in the emergency room shot, stabbed, or beaten, the book weaves the voices of his patients—who were often both victims and perpetrators—with Rich’s reflections on what he regards as an enormously complex urban tragedy.

Rich spoke in late 2019 with Madeline Drexler, editor of Harvard Public Health.

Read their full interview, Healing the Hurt, in the Harvard Public Health magazine's Winter 2020 issue.