Emily Rapp grew up in Wyoming and Colorado before attending St. Olaf College for her undergraduate degree and Harvard University, where she earned a graduate Divinity degree. Born with a congenital defect, she lost her left foot to amputation at age four and has worn a prosthetic limb since then. Coming of age with that physical disability is the subject of her unflinching and emotionally honest memoir, Poster Child, published by Bloomsbury in 2006.

Emily entered the MFA program an accomplished fiction writer who had already received a distinguished Fulbright fellowship. In a course on memoir with professor Laura Furman, she wrote an essay which would become the seedling of Poster Child, and it won the 2003 Atlantic Monthly student writing contest in nonfiction. The next year, she secured a publisher's interest in the memoir.

Since graduation in 2005, Emily has held residencies at the Jentel Arts Foundation in Wyoming, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University and awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Women Writers. She now lives in L.A., where she is on the core faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University of Southern California. She also serves on the faculty of UCLA's Extension program and the Gotham Writers' Workshop.