Award-winning journalist and HIV and AIDS activist Regan Hofmann will speak at the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom today.
The free event will be held at 7 p.m. and is part of UF’s annual Common Reading Program. The UF bookstore will be selling Hofmann’s memoir, and she will be signing autographs.
Alison Spannaus, the event’s organizer, said she reached out to Hofmann as a speaker because of Hofmann’s personal history with HIV.
Hofmann said when she found out she was diagnosed with HIV in 1996, her doctor told her she only had one year to live. With little knowledge of HIV, she’d planned her funeral.
“I really thought of the end of my life,” she said. “At the time, it was a death sentence.”
Six years after her diagnosis, she said she realized living a normal life was possible.
Hofmann used journalism to raise awareness.
She said she put herself on the cover of the first publication she worked on, announcing to everyone she was diagnosed with HIV.
She said her announcement shocked her relatives and colleagues.
Hofmann said she became an HIV and AIDS activist because she believes what happened to her doesn’t have to happen to anyone else.
She said it is “criminal that we don’t do a better job at teaching young adults about the disease.”
A version of this story ran on page 5 on 9/12/2013 under the headline "HIV-positive writer speaks"
