Early Life
Born into a career Army family, Mary Brightwell Edwards, as she was then named, lived in 20 houses and attended 12 schools by the time she was 18. She has one brother, David, born in 1940. Their father. David Lincoln Edwards (USMA, 1936), took the family overseas on assignments to West Germany in the early 1950s and to France in the early 1960s, where Mary attended a French school for two years (the Lycee Internationale, also known as SHAPE School, then in St. Germain-en-Laye, France). Bases where she lived growing up include Ft. Myer, Virginia; Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, and Ft. Monroe, Virginia. She graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1973 with a B.A. in philosophy, and began a career in journalism. She worked for two newspapers in Virginia, doing investigative reporting, feature writing, and a column, before moving to San Francisco and Chicago to pursue other projects. In 1985 she married James V. Wertsch, Ph.D. They have two sons.
Wertsch now lives in St. Louis, where her husband is on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. She is routinely interviewed and invited to speak on the subject of military brats. She collaborates with Marc Curtis of the Military Brat Registry to present workshops for military brats around the country and on annual cruises. She is the founder and president of Brightwell Publishing, the first publishing house dedicated to books and films that explore and strengthen military brat cultural identity, and writes The Military Brat Blog.
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