Emma Lew was born in 1962. She completed an arts degree in 1986 and has worked as a proof-reader, sub-editor and secretary. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has published two collections of poetry in her native Australia, the second of which was reissued in the UK by Shearsman Books in 2006.

In a Working Note for How2 in 2001, she said:

"What I try for in my poems is an effect similar to an experience I had years ago while visiting a touring exhibition of American Pop Art. I was standing up close in front of a painting of a long, low building that was rising out of a background of lurid yellow-green. The style was unfamiliar among the Warhols and Oldenburgs, so I wasn't giving it careful attention. But I remember being jolted out of my numb gaze when I noticed a small patch of flame and smoke over on the far right-hand side of the roof. This serene, unassuming building was actually on fire—the horror and absurdity of it! An instant of tremendous surprise and disorientation, at once disturbing and thrilling; a feeling of being violently reawoken that was delicious and compelling. I didn't think to look for the artist's name at the time, and only years later discovered it to be Ed Ruscha. The search itself, though, somehow also became part of that long, mysterious moment." (Copyright © Emma Lew.)