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 →

Levine

If you visited the Cloud Room co-working space on weekends over the past few years, you might have spotted Stacey Levine, the writer and long-time Capitol Hill resident who this month learned she was one of four finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel Mice 1961.

“Every weekend, I would go there and work on this novel,” said Levine. “I wrote most of it over eight years at the Cloud Room. On the way, I’d pass all these people eating dinner out and having fun, and I was very grumpy because I had to keep working on the book.”

Those years of hard work paid off. In addition to the Pulitzer nod, The Washington Post favorably reviewed Mice 1961—describing Levine as a “gifted performance artist of literary fiction—part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower” and the novel as “a brilliant chemistry of alienation and familiarity I’ve never seen anywhere else”—and included it in their list of 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2024.

A Cold War era novel set in South Florida on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Mice 1961 follows three unforgettable characters: the orphaned siblings Jody and her 18-year-old younger sister Ivy, nicknamed “Mice” and cruelly bullied by teenagers for her albinism, and their housekeeper, Girtle, who sleeps behind the sisters’ couch and narrates the novel. Jody, Mice, and Girtle are surrounded by odd neighbors, all preparing for an elaborate neighborhood potluck.

The novel is witty, with Levine’s prose evocative. She describes Mice as a “white-pink creature” with “milkscape” features—“peel-thin ears,” “jittering eyes,” and “cream-orange-tipped white lashes, much like two thin, tidy rows of camel hair.” Mice’s “bottomless absence of color” renders her “a shadow in reverse.”

Levine, who also teaches composition, creative writing, and poetry at Seattle Central College, has published three novels and two short story collections, earned a PEN Fiction Award and The Stranger Genius Award for Literature, and was twice named a Washington State Book Award Finalist. She spoke to CHS during a phone interview the day after the Pulitzer honors were announced.

Congratulations. When did you first learn your novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction?

Thanks! I was in my office at Seattle Central College. Karen Maeda Allman, former events programmer at Elliott Bay Books, posted something general about “Tessa Hulls, Stacey Levine, and Pulitzer Prize.” It didn’t make any sense to me. I hadn’t heard anything from the Pulitzer Prize Board. I still haven’t. I think maybe they’re known for being silent once they make their decisions. Continue reading →