Margaret Edson (born 4 July 1961, Washington, D.C.) is an American playwright. As a child, she wrote and acted in amateur plays with neighborhood friend Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She graduated with a B.A. in Renaissance History from Smith College, and received a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. Her jobs have included being a bicycle shop sales clerk and a volunteer ESL teacher.
Edson's first play was Wit, first produced in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in California, about a John Donne scholar who is hospitalized for and dying of ovarian cancer. Edson did use her work experience in a hospital as part of the background in writing the play.[1][2] At the time of its first New York production in late 1998, Edson was a kindergarten teacher at Centennial Place Elementary School (Atlanta, Georgia). The play won her the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[3] The award brought her a large amount of publicity, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Edson has written a second play, Satisfied, whose subject is "country-gospel radio in Kentucky"--[2]still, as of April 2008, unproduced.
Edson gave the address during the commencement ceremony of 2008 at Smith College.
As of December 30, 2011 Edson teaches 6th grade social studies at Inman Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia.
|
||||||||