Interview of Margot Soven, Ph.D.

Dr. Margot Iris Soven was born in the early 1940s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She spent her early life in New York City, attending public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She received her bachelor’s in English from Brooklyn College. After college, she married her husband, Paul, and moved with him to Chicago, where she taught at a high school while earning her master’s in English at DePaul University. She enrolled in an English literature PhD program at Rutgers while living in New Jersey and completed a PhD in rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania after moving to Philadelphia. In 1980, Margot joined La Salle’s English department, where she currently holds the rank of Professor. In addition to her teaching, she has held several administrative positions at La Salle, including Director of the Core Curriculum and the First Year Odyssey Program (2000-present), Director of the Writing Tutors Program (1985- 2000), Director of Writing Across the Curriculum (1982-1995), and Director of Composition (1980-1995). Margot currently lives with her husband in the Philadelphia suburbs and has three grown children and four grandchildren