Carol Emshwiller is an American writer of avant garde short stories and science fiction who has won prizes including the Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards. Ursula K. Le Guin has called her "a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction." In 2005, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in April 2007.

She is the widow of the artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller . Their son is the actor, artist, screenwriter, and novelist Peter Emshwiller .