Margaret Edson

Margaret Edson grew up in Washington D.C., the daughter of a newspaper columnist and a medical social worker. She received her undergraduate degree from Smith College in Renaissance history, worked odd jobs in Iowa, lived in a French convent in Rome, and then returned home to D.C. to work as a unit clerk on the cancer treatment floor of a research hospital. Her two years working there inspired her to begin working on Wit, which she wrote during the summer of 1991 while working at a bicycle shop in D.C. That fall, she enrolled in a graduate English program at Georgetown and began teaching in the D.C. public schools on the side, which she discovered she enjoyed more than academia. This led her to leave her graduate program with a master’s degree and begin a career as a teacher. In 1995, a theater in California produced Wit and the play won major Los Angeles drama awards before being produced on the east coast (in New York and in New Haven, CT) in the late 1990s. Although Wit was a major success, earning Edson the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, she never wrote another play. Instead, she pursued elementary education. As of late, she teaches sixth-grade in Atlanta, where she lives with her partner Linda and their two sons.