Career
Ursula K. Le Guin has called her "a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction." Among her novels are Carmen Dog and The Mount. She has also written two cowboy novels called Ledoyt and Leaping Manitoba Hill. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in April 2007.
She is the widow of the artist and experimental filmmaker Editor Emshwiller.
Their daughter Susan Emshwiller co-wrote the movie Pollock. Their son Peter Emshwiller is an actor, artist, screenwriter, and novelist.
Their daughter Eve is a botanist and ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Emshwiller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She lives in New York City most of the year, and spends her summers in Owens Valley, California, and has used this setting in her stories.
In 2009, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.