Emily Parker is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, a book published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book tells the stories of Internet activists in China, Cuba and Russia. Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised it as "a rigorously researched and reported account that reads like a thriller."

Parker graduated with Honors from Brown University with a double major in International Relations and Comparative Literature (French and Spanish). She has a Masters from Harvard University in East Asian Studies.

Parker speaks Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish.

Parker was a member of the Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she advised on Internet freedom, digital diplomacy and open government. Before her time in government, Emily spent over five years working for The Wall Street Journal, first as a writer in Hong Kong and later as a writer and editor in New York. She wrote a Wall Street Journal column called "Virtual Possibilities: China and the Internet." She is also a former editor at The New York Times.

Parker is currently digital diplomacy advisor and Future Tense fellow at New America.

Parker was the Chief Strategy Officer at Parlio, a Silicon Valley start-up that was co-founded by former Google executive Wael Ghonim. In 2016, Parlio was acquired by Quora.