Hulls inside the Volunteer Park Conservatory, where she used to often work at the bench under the staghorn fern

By Matt Dowell

This 2025 Pulitzer finalist wrote her novel in a Capitol Hill coworking space.

This 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner once made Volunteer Park her studio.

Tessa Hulls is always on the move. Recently back in Seattle but with plans to leave soon for the wilderness, she was “mostly just biking all over the city being deeply overwhelmed by summer” when CHS reached out to talk.

In May, Hulls’s graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. She found out in the middle of a shift at the legislative lounge in the Alaska State Capitol building, where she’s worked seasonally.

The work, published in Spring 2024, traces her maternal family’s arc from Shanghai during the Chinese Communist revolution through her mother’s immigration to the United States to Hulls’s own upbringing in Northern California. The story is told within the context of unprocessed trauma and mental illness, particularly that of her grandmother who suffered a mental breakdown after publishing her own successful memoir.

The memoir has been lauded for its information-packed but approachable artistic style. According to one review: “Despite the extreme weight of the story, the density of the historical context and the way every bit of space is utilized to communicate pictorially or verbally, that information is surprisingly digestible — and even nourishing.”

Hulls honed that skill, in part, within our city limits, going to the Seattle Public Library every week for a year to check out and study graphic novels. She made Capitol Hill home in 2012 after a cross-country bike trip. Though she’s traveled to and lived in places far and wide since then — including a stint as a bartender in Antarctica — she continues to hold ties to the neighborhood. Continue reading →