Emma Tanaka is a Japanese American novelist and former museum registrar raised in Harbor City, Los Angeles. She studied literature at UC Santa Cruz and earned an MFA from the University of Oregon, where she later taught creative writing as a visiting lecturer. Before turning to fiction full-time, she spent a decade cataloging artifacts for small coastal museums, a job that honed her fascination with the way ordinary objects smuggle extraordinary histories.
Tanaka is the author of the story collection Salt Warehouse and the novel Ghost Tide. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House Online, The Common, and Ploughshares, and received a Pushcart Prize special mention. She lives in Astoria, Oregon, where she volunteers with a maritime archives project, hikes the headlands in most kinds of weather, and is always adding to a private index of odd labels and lost-and-found tags.
