Tessa Hulls On The Weight Of History, The Power Of Comics, And Winning A Pulitzer Prize

Earlier this month, Tessa Hulls was working her usual contract job as a sous-chef in the private legislative dining lounge at the Alaska state capital in Juneau when she started getting an unusually high volume of text messages on her phone. She glanced at them between tasks. Had she been nominated for some kind of award? Eventually, one of the legislators came up to her, put his arm over her shoulder, and told her, “No, you weren’t nominated. You just won a Pulitzer Prize!”

Indeed, when the awards were announced on May 7, Hulls’ memoir, Feeding Ghosts (Macmillan, 2024), became only the second graphic novel to win the prestigious award. The first, more than 30 years ago, was Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman.

Like Maus, Feeding Ghosts is an intense blend of intergenerational family trauma and world-historical events. Tessa’s maternal grandmother, Sun Yi, worked as a journalist in Shanghai in the 1940s and had a front row seat for the Communist revolution. Falling under increasing surveillance by the authorities, she eventually fled to Hong Kong with her daughter, Tessa’s mother, but succumbed to mental illness from which she never recovered. The book explores Tessa’s discovery of both the public and private history that her family had fled, told in expressionistic black and white drawings over nearly 400 pages.

Feeding Ghosts succeeds as a both work of narrative and a work of art, made a bunch of best-of- lists, and has won or been nominated for a stack of major awards including the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Ainsfield Wolf Prize, the Libby Award, and the Will Eisner Award. While Maus winning a Special Citation Pulitzer in 1992 felt almost like the institution was condescending to recognize that “wow, comics aren’t just for kids anymore!”, the award for Feeding Ghosts in the memoir category in 2025 seems like appropriate recognition for an undeniably serious and accomplished work, regardless of the medium of expression.

“I’ve always been a visual artist and a writer,” Hulls explained in a phone interview earlier this week. “Writing was the scaffolding, but I came up as a visual artist. My main career was painting, but I started to realize that writing was a more important part of what I was doing.”

Hulls says she left home as a teenager to embark on a life of restless travel, alternating stints in cities with long, solitary forays into the wilderness. Her biography on her website describes her as “a compulsive genre hopper who has worked… as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher and researcher.” Eventually she came to understand that her wanderlust was a symptom of a deeper ambiguity she carried with her.

“I grew up with my grandmother and my nuclear family and knew something horrific had happened to her, but it was never really talked about and I didn’t have the context of Chinese history to understand what had brought her to that point. All I knew is that I had a complicated relationship with my mom and I literally ran away from it to become this globetrotting adventurer.”

Shortly after she turned 30, Hulls said she realized she would never have peace until she faced her family drama. She got back in touch with her mother to explain that she had to tell this story, no matter how hard or how long it would take. The journey ended up lasting nine years, during which time Hulls had to internalize the craft of both journalists and historians to come to grips with the full scope of the subject. It drained her enough that she has sworn she will never do another book, notwithstanding the remarkable success that Feeding Ghosts has enjoyed.

“I had to learn a lot of history to understand how my grandmother’s story was nestled within the broader strokes of what was happening in China,” she says, admitting that she used the scholarship as an excuse to delay dealing with the emotional issues she knew she would eventually have to explore.

While she was working on the book, she became an “accidental graphic journalist,” covering the CHOP uprising in Seattle where protesters occupied the neighborhood around a police precinct for several weeks in response to the George Floyd killing in 2020. “I had always understood how comics are a powerful tool for explaining context and being able to visually show the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm,” she says. “I could see that the information about CHOP that was going out on social and other media didn’t contain the context to make sense of it.”

She used her personal knowledge of the neighborhood and the protests to inform her coverage. Her comics-style reportage became a critical firsthand source of information and breaking news. “I think that experience really showed me the power of comics journalism, and it also made me really wary about the reductive way that complex information is filtered through social media. It both caused me to embrace and pull back from what that sort of mode of journalism could be.”

In Feeding Ghosts, the disconnect between Sun Yi’s training and instincts as a journalist, and the requirements of the increasingly totalitarian Communist regime to make reality conform to their narrative, literally drove her insane. Hulls acknowledges the parallels with her experience covering an event like CHOP, which is now described in the consensus discourse as an event where Seattle descended into chaos and anarchy, rather than a demonstration of solidarity around social justice.

“That was one of the threads that I became really fascinated by,” she says. “The ways people become paranoid. People choose to sever ties and we all living within our own realities. That’s so much a talking point that we forget that there is a huge amount of collateral damage that happens within interpersonal relationships when people withdraw into their own realities.”

When Feeding Ghosts was finally published after nearly a decade of intense work, Hulls says she felt a sense of liberation in finally having the story out in the world. She says the recognition and awards, while surprising (at least in the case of the Pulitzer, which does not publish a shortlist of works under consideration and only announces the winner), were validating of the journey.

“In the aftermath of this complete shock of winning a Pulitzer, I think what I’ve been reflecting on and really feeling is this sense of Oh my God, my grandma did it! She saved my mom, and she saved me. And this prize has given me a feeling of safety that goes so far beyond my personal circumstances where it feels like it has allowed me to put down a fear that my family has been carrying for three generations.”