Margaret Edson is an American playwright. She graduated with a B.A. in Renaissance History from Smith College, and received a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. 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. 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 DramaThe 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."
