Campus News
March 18th, 2025
Ripley JCLS rescheduled for March 31st
Maryland author and life coach to detail 38-year battle against HIV
Vaughn Ripley's Joan Crawford Lecture Series presentation, cancelled due to inclement weather last month, will take place on Monday, March 31st at 6 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center at Garrett College conference center.
Ripley's presentation – Thriving Against the Odds: A Journey of Adventure and Resilience – is free and open to the general public. He will be talking about his life journey as a hemophiliac who contracted human immunodeficiency virus from a tainted blood transfusion in 1987. Ripley then overcame drug addiction while successfully battling HIV for more than 38 years.
Ripley, who lives in Maryland with his wife and son, was born with hemophilia in 1967. Just a teenager when he contracted HIV, he responded at first with what he termed "a hard life of drugs and alcohol," before turning his life around. Ripley chronicled his life story in Survivor: One Man's Battle with HIV, Hemophilia, and Hepatitis C (2010).
The Joan Crawford Lecture Series honors dynamic educator Joan R. Crawford, who died in 2010 after serving the Garrett College community for 30 years in a variety of faculty and staff roles.
For more information, contact Stephanie Miller at stephanie.miller@garrettcollege.edu.
