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Award-winning playwright Margaret Edson, a
Smith College alumna who teaches kindergarten in the Atlanta public school system,
was the speaker at the college’s 130th commencement ceremony Sunday, May 18.
Following her address, Edson and two other accomplished women received honorary degrees.
Edson graduated from Smith in 1983 with a degree in
Renaissance history and afterward pursued a series of odd jobs, including bartending
at a rural bar in Iowa, painting the interior of a Dominican convent in Rome and
clerking in the cancer and AIDS inpatient unit at a hospital in Washington, D.C.
While working at a bicycle shop in 1991, Edson wrote
the play Wit, the story of a scholar of 17th-century English poetry who
is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Although it took four years for Edson to find a
theater company that would produce the play, once it was introduced to audiences,
the production went on to win critical acclaim. In addition to garnering the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama in 1999, Wit captured the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding
Play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best new play and the Oppenheimer
Award. When it was broadcast on HBO in 2001, the production won an Emmy for best
film.
During her search for a producer for Wit, Edson
earned a master’s degree in English literature from Georgetown University,
where she defended her thesis on the use of poetry to teach reading by performing
a rap song by Queen Latifah. She began teaching public school in the District of
Columbia and later moved to Atlanta to accept her kindergarten post; it is the job
of which she says she is most proud.
Of her work teaching children to read, Edson once noted: “That’s
the biggest thing you learn in your whole life...It’s the thing that opens
your mind the most, that gives you the most power.” Her own play, Wit, is
widely used in high school English courses.
In addition to Edson, the following women received honorary
degrees from Smith on May 18:
Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international
correspondent
Christiane Amanpour has reported on crises from many of the world’s
news hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda
and the Balkans. Her assignments have ranged from exclusive interviews with world
leaders – British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac,
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, former Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev, among
others – to reporting on the human consequences of natural disasters and wars.
In all, Amanpour has won nine Emmy awards, including one for her documentary “Struggle
for Islam.”
Beate Sirota Gordon, women’s rights advocate
At the age of 22, as a member of a team that worked under Gen. Douglas MacArthur,
Beate Sirota Gordon helped author an equal rights clause in Japan’s Constitution.
Keeping in mind that the U.S. constitution had failed to specifically guarantee women’s
rights, and drawing on her experience growing up in Japan, Gordon insisted on inserting
a clause granting equal rights to Japanese women. Her memoir, The Only Woman
in the Room, published in 2001, recounts her work for the government, work that
was also publicized in the 2005 film The Gift from Beate.
Mae C. Jemison, who was to receive an honorary degree,
was unable to attend the ceremony. |
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2008
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