Alycia Marlayne Veronica Jude Ripley was born in Amherst, New York on April 3rd. Her parents soon divorced but she quickly established a very close bond with her mother and grandmother. While in nursery school she became an avid reader and enthusiastic cinemaphile; the process of breathing life into characters formed the only child’s goals of becoming a writer and actress. Along with attending Mt. St. Joseph’s Academy, she studied at Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theatre where she was given the first opportunity to perform her own work, eager to replicate the experience of watching her favorite movies.

Ripley’s high school career was spent at The Buffalo Seminary, where she was active in student government, the drama department, and wrote several short stories, one of which won first place in a county-wide contest.

Ripley studied at Vassar College for her freshman year before transferring to the larger and more diverse Syracuse University, graduating with a double major in English and Psychology in the spring of 2000. She was a participant in American University’s Justice and Law program and worked for both the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. After re-locating to New York City, she was a Client Services Representative at Sotheby’s Auction House and was accepted into New York University’s Creative Writing Graduate Program where she wrote the short stories “Two White Houses,” “Dating Jason Statham,” and began her novel Traveling With An Eggplant.

The finishing touches on Eggplant were completed while Ripley was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. She performed both her own original work and notable plays such as The Shape of Things, and Barefoot in the Park at New York’s Marilyn Monroe Theatre. Her workDid you know? Eggplant was turned down by literary agents for 1) not having any sex scenes and 2) "making readers think too much." has been called “both endlessly funny and relentlessly disturbing, a provocative mix of colorful dreamscapes and awful nightmares that settle into your thoughts and refuse to let go.”