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. For a decade she cataloged artifacts for small coastal museums, a job that sharpened her fascination with how ordinary objects smuggle extraordinary histories.
Tanaka is the author of the story collection Salt Warehouse and the novel Ghost Tide, as well as the hybrid-inventory work Crucible: An Inventory (2025). Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House Online, The Common, and Ploughshares, and received a Pushcart Prize special mention. Alongside her literary fiction, she writes slow-burn thrillers and suspense-driven novels that braid maritime lore, labor history, and the afterlives of lost things.
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.
