Eden was born into a Reform Jewish household. She began writing about independent-label rock music under the abbreviated name Dawn Eden in 1985 for rock fanzines, eventually becoming a popular-music historian, writing for Mojo, Salon, New York Press, and Billboard, among others. From 1990 through the early 2000s, she penned liner notes for eighty CD reissues. Artists she interviewed for liner notes, magazine articles or radio include Harry Nilsson (his last interview), Brian Wilson, Del Shannon, and Lesley Gore.

In October 1999, Eden, by then an agnostic, had what she describes in The Thrill of the Chaste as a “born-again experience." Transformed into a “committed Christian," she gradually left the world of rock journalism. Her last music-business job was handling PR for the World Trade Center’s oldies concert series in the summer of 2001.

She worked as a copy editor at the New York Post, first on a part-time basis and later full-time, from early 2002 to January 2005. In April 2004, she wrote a headline about a toilet-bowl collapse that would win first place in the "Brightest Headline" category of the New York State Associated Press Awards: "HURT IN LINE OF DOODY." Her forced departure from the Post, which was after changes she made to a story revealed her pro-life sympathies, was the subject of a feature by George Gurley in the New York Observer, "Eden in Exile." Eden has asserted that, prior to her firing, her supervisor warned her against identifying herself as a New York Post employee when giving interviews in which she discussed her Christian faith.

In April 2005, Eden was hired by the New York Daily News as associate news editor of its newly relaunched National Edition. She later became deputy news editor for the newspaper's new weekly regional editions, wrote its first-ever column on blogs, and edited its regular feature "Big Town, Big Heart." She was received into the Catholic Church in 2006, and her book The Thrill of the Chaste was published that December.

Eden left the Daily News to join the Cardinal Newman Society in July 2007 to direct its new Love & Responsibility Program. While there, she co-organized the "Modest Proposals" seminar at Ethics and Public Policy Centerand organized the Sisters of Life's first-ever on-campus training for students seeking to learn how to support peers in crisis pregnancies. In December 2007, she left the Cardinal Newman Society after the organization shifted its priorities to focus on research rather than outreach.

In 2008, she was successfully treated for thyroid cancer.

Since the publication of The Thrill of the Chaste, Eden has spoken to college students and young adults in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Poland, and at World Youth Day Sydney. She has also appeared on EWTN and on NBC's Today Show.

In May 2010, she received an M.A. in theology from Dominican House of Studies after defending her master's thesis, a critique of Christopher West's presentation of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body. Three months later, after Alice von Hildebrand cited Eden's research in her own critique of West, Catholic News Agency made the thesis available as a free download.