Two Chicago authors met at an AIDS conference hundreds of miles from home. Now they're teaming up to keep the epidemic on people's radar

Celeste Watkins-Hayes and Victoria Noe were strangers to one another, each hundreds of miles from home, when they found themselves at neighboring booths at September's U.S. Conference on AIDS in Washington, D.C.

"Here we are in this mix of activists and advocates and policymakers and people from the private sector," Watkins-Hayes said. "Out of thousands of people we managed to be in adjacent booths, both from the city of Chicago. I just think it was kismet that we were brought together."

Both women were at the conference signing