As a child, Edson enjoyed staging neighborhood plays and later performed in several high-school drama productions, but she never aspired to a career in the theater.
From 1979 to 1983 Edson attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor's degree in history. Having developed an interest in monasticism during college, she spent a year in a Dominican convent in Rome and held a series of odd jobs, including selling hot dogs on the street in Iowa City, Iowa, and ice cream in Washington, D.C. From 1984 to 1986 she worked as a unit clerk in the AIDS/ oncology unit of a Washington-area research hospital. In an unpublished 8 February 2000 interview she explained that in September 1991 she decided to "get serious . . . and get a Ph.D." She completed her master's degree in literature at Georgetown University in 1992, writing her thesis on teaching with poetry. While pursuing graduate study at Georgetown, she volunteered for her church as an English as a Second Language tutor and subsequently enrolled in a local program to bring people from other professions into public education. Instead of pursuing her Ph.D. in literature, Edson focused on teaching children to read.
This is a free page. This page contains 195 words. This
biography contains 2,262 words (approx. 8 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Margaret Edson Access Pass.
