Carmen Murakami is a Japanese Mexican American writer and former transit data analyst whose work bridges infrastructure, memory, and the uncanny. Raised in Southern California within earshot of the Alameda Corridor, she studied civil engineering and urban design at UC Berkeley before pivoting to fiction that treats maps as instruments and stories as timetables.
Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Nature Futures, exploring the hidden geometries of cities and the people who carry them. She is the author of the novella Switchyard and the story collection Signal Lost, both of which trace the emotional topography of departure and return. When not writing, she volunteers with rail preservation groups, collects obsolete transit tokens, and hikes decommissioned rights of way across the West.
Carmen Murakami lives in Seattle, where she keeps a map case by the door and an old brass conductor whistle on her desk, a reminder that every journey begins with a sound.
