A&T to Host Talk, Book Signing for Graves’ ‘Why Black People Die Sooner’

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Nov. 5, 2025) – North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University will host a talk and book signing by MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology Joseph L. Graves Jr., Ph.D., on Wednesday, Nov. 19.

The event celebrating Graves’ latest book, “Why Black People Die Sooner: Medical Misconceptions, How They Harm, and How to Fix It,” will take place at 1 p.m. at the N.C. A&T Student Center, 1403 John W. Mitchell Drive, Greensboro.

“Why Black People Die Sooner” was published by Columbia University Press on Oct. 21 and reviewed in Science two days later. Amazon listed the book as its Top Release in Epidemiology.

Personal experience motivated Graves to write it. “Every African American family has dealt with an elevated mortality rate because of medical incompetence,” he said.

We see this manifest in all leading causes of death – from heart disease to stroke and from cancer to diabetes – where African Americans die younger than those of all other socially-defined races.

“The leading cause of Black people dying sooner is structural racism,” said Graves. “A major contributing factor is medical misconceptions about human, biological variation and medicine consistently gets that wrong.”

Copies of “Why Black People Die Sooner” will be available for purchase from the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Student Center.

Graves now has three more books in the works, including “Anti-Racist Medicine,” for which he has collaborated with researchers from Oxford University and will publish early in 2026 from Elsevier.

Graves’ explorations of race, biology and genetics have won international acclaim in recent years. In particular, “A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems” (Basic Books) and “Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions” (Columbia University Press, co-written with biological anthropologist Alan H. Goodman), both published in 2022, drew rave reviews by critics in higher education and the scientific community. “Racism, Not Race” won the W.W. Howells Award from the American Association of Anthropologists for the Best Book in Biological Anthropology in 2024.

Sometimes called “Black Darwin,” Graves is the first person of African descent to earn a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, which he received in 1988 from Wayne State University. One of three people honored with a Liberty Science Center Genius Award in 2024, he is an extensively published evolutionary biologist with pioneering work on the evolution of aging, and in microbial evolution.