Emily D. Edwards began her media writing career as a journalist, reporting for ABC and NBC affiliates in Alabama and Tennessee. She has written and produced news stories and documentaries for both radio and television. In the early 1970s when employees in small and medium market stations wore many hats, Edwards wrote, produced, and directed television news, commercials, and public service programs. In 1984 she earned a Ph.D. in journalism and mass communication at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and moved back to Alabama to direct the broadcasting program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 1987, Dr. Edwards joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she is now a professor emeritas from the Department of Media Studies.

Her nationally distributed documentaries include: Dead Heads: An American Subculture, Wondrous Events: Foundations of Folk Belief and Wondrous Healing. Edwards is published in TDR, NARAS Journal, Creative Scriptwriting, Popular Music and Society, Southern Folklore, The Southern Communication Journal, and Gender Roles, among others. She contributed chapters to the following books: Current Research in Film, A Haunting Question, and Adolescents and Their Music. Her book, Metaphysical Media: The Occult Experience in Popular Culture was published in 2005 by Southern Illinois University Press.

Edwards is an author and filmmaker familiar with writing and publishing manuscripts about witches, ghosts, wondrous healing, and legend tripping having published about morbid curiosity and dark tourism, houses that try to be haunted, iniquitous southern undertakers, haunted guitars, firewalking, and the root workers in illegal southern bars or drink houses, among other odd subjects.

In the 2020s she contributed a short story about a haunted guitar to Krampus Tales: A Killer Anthology (2020) and had the featured article about morbid curiosity in the Australian Journal of Parapsychology (2020). Her recent books include non-fiction works such as Bars, Blues, and Booze (2016), Graphic Violence (2020), and Truth and Storytelling (2022) and a novel about southern root doctors with a forthcoming publication date of February 2024. Her films include award-winning documentaries, narrative feature films, and animated shorts. As a filmmaker is is best known for the documentaries Deadheads: An American Subculture, Wondrous Events, and Wondrous Healing. Her award-winning feature films include Scripture Cake and Bone Creek.