She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife,[2][3] and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.

[1] Emerson published eight poetry collections through Louisiana State University Press's Southern Messenger Poets series: Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion: An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), Figure Studies: Poems (2008), Secure the Shadow (2012), The Opposite House (2015), Impossible Bottle (2015), and Claude Before Time and Space (2018).

[1] Three collections were published posthumously, The Opposite House (March 2015), Impossible Bottle (September 2015) and Claude Before Time and Space (February 2018).

[citation needed][14] On August 26, 2008, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia, by then Governor Tim Kaine[15] and served until 2010.

She spent over a decade at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as an English professor and the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry.