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.
Tanaka is the author of the story collection Salt Warehouse and the novel Ghost Tide; the hybrid-inventory work Crucible: An Inventory (2025); historical fiction like The Collapse of Portobello (2024); and slow-burn thrillers such as Lantern and Violin (2023) and The Pistol Maker's Daughter (2026). Her fiction braids maritime lore, labor history, and the afterlives of lost objects with investigative suspense and archival detail. 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, volunteers with a maritime archives project, hikes the headlands in most kinds of weather, and keeps a private index of odd labels and lost-and-found tags.
