Only two graphic novels have ever won a Pulitzer. The first, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, took the prize in 1992. The second, Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls, received the award this May.
When Hulls found out, she was working her day job as the sous chef at a private legislative lounge in Juneau, Alaska. She barely had enough internet access to get the news that her memoir—a sprawling volume that crosses oceans to tell the story of three generations of women—had won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography.
The news might have seemed a little eerie. Nearly 70 years earlier, Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, published her own memoir, Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, Persecution, about her work as a journalist during the communist takeover in China. While it didn’t win a Pulitzer, the book was an overnight success—and then Sun Yi had a mental breakdown. Feeding Ghosts explores the story of how one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history influenced her own family’s trauma, but it’s about so much more: how our cultural myths form us, the barriers to intergenerational communication, the impossibility of ever truly understanding the past, and the possibility of healing.
Yet when I reach Hulls via Zoom at her art studio in Juneau in mid-May, it’s Seattle that she wants to talk about. In some ways, that’s where her path to the prize began.
“Seattle is where I became a multidisciplinary weirdo,” Hulls explains. Before that, she was a painter, working in gouache to create intricately detailed, part-human/part-animal characters awash in saturated reds and blues. When people asked what type of art she made, the answer was relatively straightforward. But Seattle taught her “to become very strange,” as she puts it.
She can pinpoint the exact moment that happened. It was Breadline, a performance series at Vermillion Gallery and Bar run by some poet friends. She had just returned from biking solo across the US, followed by a stint working as a temp cook in Antarctica.
“I asked my friend to throw me on the schedule for Breadline with no idea of what I was gonna do,” she admits. “I started collecting every used hair tie I found on the street. I did that for six months, not knowing why I was doing it. And I ended up giving this illustrated multimedia presentation called ‘What We Make When We're Not Making: An Exploration of the Necessity of Downtime in the Creative Process... As Explained by Hair Ties.’ And that is the moment where something changed, and I never looked back.”
It wasn’t just about the hair ties, though. (The talk had to do with the necessity of close observation and getting out of the way of one’s intuition.) It was an immersion in the Seattle arts scene of circa 2012 that provided Hulls both the freedom and the community to begin tackling new forms. She credits projects like Weird and Awesome with Emmett Montgomery at Annex Theatre, as well as contemporary theater On the Boards (where she served as an ambassador) and art space Canoe Social Club, for being platforms that allowed her to take first steps toward becoming a prizewinning polymath.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite being a memoir in the form of a graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts wasn’t born out of a love of comics. (Although Hulls does note that Calvin and Hobbes was the first thing that ever made her want to be an artist.)
“My gateway drug to comics was poetry,” she says. Around 2012, after a breakup, she ended up being adopted by a group of local poets. “Hanging out with people who were really fascinated by the structural mechanics of language made me think about words as structure in a different way,” she says. The concision of poetry was like playing “a game of structural Jenga” for Hulls. When she began drawing comics, she’d start by laying out text boxes before anything else, creating a kind of visual poem on the page. “I think it really shows in the sort of comics I make,” Hulls says. “I'm always thinking about how they function as poems.”
Hulls believed a graphic novel was the only way to pull off something as “dense and complicated” as Feeding Ghosts. The book is dense—not in an academic sense, but in the way its pages are so richly woven with both family history and capital-H History, laden with imagery both material and symbolic, both ghostly and corporeal.
“I had a really broken story within my family,” Hull replies, when asked what drove her to create the book. “I wanted to stop the haunting.”
She’ll be the first to tell you that making the book nearly killed her. The process took a decade, including four years of research and a year and a half of arts residencies. (She thanks her grandmother’s “incredibly meddling ghost” for getting her into them all.) For six months in 2019, she lived alone in the woods at the PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing Residency in Oregon. When she finally emerged, after having sold the book rights to a publisher, she was desperate for human connection.
Two months later, COVID hit.
Instead of reentering the warm embrace of humanity, she retired to a friend’s uninsulated shed in Port Townsend to continue work on the book. “I was just completely alone,” she says. “In a shack, drawing my crying mother all day, with no ability to step away from it. It really broke me.”
That experience is part of why she says she’ll never make another book again. “I don't ever want to have to turn away from the world for multiple years,” she says.
These days, she has a new goal—to become an embedded comics journalist working on scientific expeditions. It’s not an extant career, but one she aims to create for herself.
“What I really want to do is fuse my love of the wilderness and my love of creativity in a way that’s of service. A lot of what I've ended up doing professionally is around social justice and racial justice, but I want to go further upstream. I think so many of the things that are plaguing us as a species are because we've lost our fundamental sense of being tied to a broader web. I want my activism to be on that level of how can we communicate what we're losing, and how can we save it?”
Hulls is still grappling with what it means to have won a Pulitzer, as well as the slew of other awards Feeding Ghosts has garnered, among them the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Libby Book Award for Best Graphic Novel, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for memoir. What is certain: The accolades are a testament to the feat Hulls has pulled off, a recognition of the darkness she plumbed and the ghosts she faced—not just for herself, but for all of us. ◼︎
Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses and Northwest Know-How: Haunts. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in The Ghastling, Happy Reader, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She lives in Seattle.
