Meet Author Tessa Hulls
Tessa Hulls is an artist, a writer, and an adventurer. She is a compulsive genre hopper who has worked in various capacities as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher, and researcher for numerous organizations.
Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and SPARK. She has received grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, and she is a fellowship recipient from the Washington Artist Trust.
Her debut graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts, was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Award for Memoir or Autobiography.
About Tessa in her own words:
"I spent almost a decade making a graphic memoir. It legit almost killed me, and I thought my ability to find joy in making was gone. But! My three great loves of community, wilderness, and motion have worked their magic: I'm ready to get back in the saddle and use my hands and voice to be of service.*
I'm setting out to become an embedded comics journalist working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits working in remote environments.
*I'm still never making another book!!!"
Explore the Work of Tessa Hulls
Learn more about Tessa and her work at tessahulls.com.
Meet Tessa Hulls, author of "Feeding Ghosts"
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About Feeding Ghosts
An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.
In Tessa's own words:
"I am on a quest to bring peace to my family’s ghosts. My grandmother Sun Yi was a journalist in Shanghai and in 1949, the year of the Communist takeover, she had an affair with a Swiss diplomat and ended up a single mother raising a mixed-race bastard child while being persecuted by the Communist government. Just before The Great Leap Forward, Sun Yi smuggled herself and my then-seven-year-old mother out of the country beneath the false bottom of a fishing boat and they fled to Hong Kong, where my grandmother wrote a bestselling memoir titled Eight Years in Red Shanghai: Love, Starvation, Persecution. Sun Yi used the money from her book to place my mother in an elite Hong Kong boarding school, which is where she learned English. Sun Yi then tragically had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized: she never truly recovered.
My mother, who never met her father, was essentially raised as an orphan by her boarding school, and when she immigrated to the US on a college scholarship she brought Sun Yi with her. I grew up with my grandma in my family home, but between her mental state and the fact that my mom didn’t teach me Chinese, I was never able to know her as a person, only as the broken ghost of a culture I did not understand.
I ran away from my family’s darkness at the first moment I could but am returning as a prodigal daughter through telling this story. While Feeding Ghosts explores loss of culture, mixed race identity, mental illness, loss of language, immigration, and generational inheritance of trauma, it is ultimately about the ways in which mothers and daughters both damage and save each other."
Awards for Feeding Ghosts
In addition to being awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, Feeding Ghosts won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book, the Libby Award (as in the beloved library app, as voted on by the nation's librarians) for best graphic novel, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for memoir, which marks the first time in its 90-year history that the award has honored a graphic novel. Feeding Ghosts was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction.