Latest news with #FeedingGhosts
Forbes
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Tessa Hulls On The Weight Of History, The Power Of Comics, And Winning A Pulitzer Prize
Tessa Hulls, writer/artist of Feeding Ghosts (Macmillian, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize ... More for Memoir 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. Page from Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (Macmillian, 2024) 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. Writer/artist and adventurer Tessa Hulls '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.'
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Seattle author Tessa Hulls wins Pulitzer for debut graphic memoir
[Source] Seattle-based Chinese American author Tessa Hulls has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography for her graphic memoir 'Feeding Ghosts.' About Hulls and her book: 'Feeding Ghosts,' which reportedly took Hulls nearly a decade to complete, chronicles three generations of Chinese women in her family, beginning with her grandmother Sun Yi, a persecuted journalist who fled China's communist government with her daughter Rose — Hulls' mother — to Hong Kong. The book details how Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir before suffering a mental breakdown, and examines the trauma passed through generations. The Pulitzer committee described it as 'an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women.' 'Shocked and grateful': In an Instagram post on Sunday, Hulls said she felt 'shocked and grateful' while acknowledging the emotional toll of creating the work. 'The nine years I spent living within my family's story nearly broke me with their isolation,' she noted. Hulls also reflected on her creative journey through a literary reference, writing, 'When magic dies, it sometimes dies forever; but new and different magic grows when you view what fell as a nurse log, ready to feed new life.' Hulls, who also recently won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize among other accolades, has stepped back from public life temporarily. 'If you need me, I'll be in the mountains; I'll come back down when I'm ready,' she wrote. Trending on NextShark: This story is part of The Rebel Yellow Newsletter — a bold weekly newsletter from the creators of NextShark, reclaiming our stories and celebrating Asian American voices. Subscribe free to join the movement. If you love what we're building, consider becoming a paid member — your support helps us grow our team, investigate impactful stories, and uplift our community. Trending on NextShark: Subscribe here now! Download the NextShark App: Want to keep up to date on Asian American News? Download the NextShark App today!
Axios
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Seattle author Tessa Hulls wins Pulitzer for her memoir
Seattle author Tessa Hulls won a Pulitzer Prize this week for her first book, "Feeding Ghosts." What they're saying: Hull's graphic memoir is "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," the Pulitzer committee wrote. What's inside: The book details how Hulls' grandmother fled persecution by the Communist government, smuggling herself and Hull's mother to Hong Kong in the false bottom of a fishing boat. "Feeding Ghosts" explores immigration, loss of culture, mental illness and mixed race identity, but "is ultimately about the ways in which mothers and daughters both damage and save each other," Hulls writes on her website.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
From Alaska Capitol's cafeteria, author and illustrator claims Pulitzer Prize
Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Feeding Ghosts," is seen at the window of the Legislative Lounge, where she works seasonally, on Monday, May 5, 2025. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon) Tessa Hulls was making sandwiches in the Alaska Capitol when she learned she had won a Pulitzer Prize. Her book, 'Feeding Ghosts,' is a nonfiction graphic novel that documents three generations of women in her family, starting with her grandmother, who was a journalist at the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution. It had already won three national awards by the time the Pulitzer announcement came on Monday, placing her among America's top writers. She won for the category of memoir or autobiography, which is in its third year and comes with a $15,000 prize. 'I'm having a surreal day,' she said, shortly after this year's winners were announced. 'Now I've got to go back to making sandwiches.' A few hours later, she had more time to talk to reporters and still appeared dazed by the news. 'It's basically the highest award someone can get. And as somebody who spent nine years learning and working on this history, I felt a huge amount of pressure to try and get it right, because I knew that I would end up speaking for a generation that I didn't live through and would come to be seen as an authority on these things,' she said. 'And so making this book made me both a historian and a journalist, and so to have this recognition at this high level, that this role that I stepped into, that I guess I got it right — it means a lot as somebody who really wants to be careful with the material I'm working with.' Hulls' book talks about a century of Chinese history that isn't well known in the United States, using her family's history to tell the story. In the process, she uncovers her grandmother's memoir, which she learns might be full of twisted information. 'It's really about how mothers and daughters both damage and save one another,' she said. The book explores personal trauma, and reviewers have frequently found connections to that issue in their own lives. 'I think almost everyone has a complicated relationship with their mother, so that's who my book is for: people with complicated relationships with their mothers,' she said. 'I think in my case, it was a little bit more concretely tied to specific history, but I think all of us are trying to understand our parents and why they ended up the ways that they did.' Hulls, who was raised in Northern California, has lived an itinerant life that has included stays in all seven continents. To see the world, she follows the food, getting jobs in food service, she said. When it came to Antarctica, she followed a job opening for a chef. For the past four months, she's been working in the Alaska Capitol's lounge — the building's version of a cafeteria — serving food to legislators, staff and visitors. When the Pulitzer winners were announced, it was lunchtime, and the lounge was full of lawmakers. 'We were just in there when she got the call. The whole lounge gave her a round of applause,' said Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham. Two representatives hurried downhill from the Capitol to the nearest bookstore, Alaska Robotics, which was already planning a book signing for Hulls on Tuesday. One of the legislators grabbed a copy of 'Feeding Ghosts,' then reconsidered and got three more, said the store's owner, Pat Race. Back at the Capitol, Hulls kept working behind the lounge's food service counter until she finished her day. Hulls enjoys cycling and the outdoors, so much so that she became known among friends for cycling to their weddings. Juneau's glum spring weather has given her plenty of time to be artistic, but she's also looking forward to the end of the legislative session. 'Next month, I've blocked out a week that just says, 'Tessa, go be alone in the backcountry.' So that's what I'm doing. Like, first available opportunity,' she said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
