Carmen Murakami is a Japanese Mexican American writer and former transit data analyst whose work braids infrastructure, memory, and the uncanny across both speculative and literary terrain. 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 prose often traces how people move through systems—rail lines, shorelines, family lines—and what those systems move through us in return.
Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Nature Futures. She is the author of the novella Switchyard, the story collection Signal Lost, and the science fiction novel Where the Tracks End. In recent years, Carmen's work has expanded into literary and psychological fiction, applying the same cartographic curiosity to lakes, neighborhoods, and domestic spaces, mapping the quiet topographies of secrecy and return.
Carmen Murakami lives in Seattle, where she volunteers with rail preservation groups, collects obsolete transit tokens, and hikes decommissioned rights of way and shoreline easements across the West. She keeps a map case by the door and an old brass conductor whistle on her desk as a reminder that every journey begins with a sound—and sometimes with silence.
