By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Seattle writer and artist Tessa Hulls has had a banner year. Today, her illustrated memoir Feeding Ghosts won top honors in the “Creative Nonfiction/Memoir” category at the Washington State Book Awards—just months after she unexpectedly took home a Pulitzer Prize for the same work. Hulls, who won the 2025 Pulitzer for “Memoir or Autobiography,” says she learned the news mid-shift while cooking for Alaska state lawmakers: “I was in a state of shock… I was grateful for the fact that I just had to keep making food.”
“Feeding Ghosts” documents Hulls’ growing up, her globetrotting, and her often-labored relationships with the female side of her family tree: a mentally-troubled grandmother, who was once a celebrity in her native mainland China, and her often-domineering mother. The book took roughly a year to complete, and Hulls says she’ll probably never complete another.
“I spent my 20s running from my family history, and when I got to Antarctica, I realized nowhere was going to be far enough away to be free of them. So shortly after I turned 30, I turned and faced my family history and started working on ‘Feeding Ghosts.’ My first step was turning towards my mother, because she was the gatekeeper to the entire story.”
She grew up in a small Northern California town (which she deliberately doesn’t name).
“When I started going to school in what was (to me!) a massive city of 10,000 people, I began to realize my family was odd, by traditional American standards. You don’t really understand how the home you’re growing up in deviates from other homes until you start being invited into other homes.”
The urge to write and the urge to draw, she said, came simultaneously.
“I was one of those kids who came out a maker, and I’ve always been pretty rabidly multidisciplinary. When I was a kid, I used to make to-scale balsa wood models of my room, and would go extremely overboard whenever tasked with making a cardboard box diorama for school. I’m a generalist for life!”
Early inspirations included “Bill Watterson’s [comic strip] ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’ the first thing that made me understand that art and writing could help deepen your understanding of the world. I was obsessed with Tamora Pierce’s ‘Song of the Lioness’ [book] quartet, in which a girl doesn’t want to grow up to be a proper lady. So she disguises herself as a boy and trains to become a knight, and becomes a totally badass—but also wrestles with questions of gender roles and responsibility. It was, in retrospect, my first introduction to the idea of feminism.”
She moved to Seattle in 2008, but admittedly loves to travel—which is how the day of the award found her in Alaska.
“Home is my bicycle and I roam all over the city! I spent about five years living in a funky old building on Capitol Hill, so Vermillion is one of my second homes. I have studio space in Inscape in the Chinatown-International District, and worked out of another studio space in that neighborhood for a few years. Honestly, if you’re trying to catch me somewhere in Seattle, your best bet is to find me out on my bike. Or at any of the branches of the library.”
As for the Asian cultural scene here in town, “I think all the time about how different my mom and grandma’s experiences could have been if they’d lived in a place like Seattle, where they could have had a sense of community and belonging. The existence of a place like ACRS (Asian Counseling and Referral Service) would never have been possible where I grew up, and I love the crop of businesses like mam’s books, Hello Em, and the reinvention of The Boat, where a new generation is carrying legacy forward in these beautiful ways that simultaneously nod to tradition and the future.”
Hulls reflected that for all of her travel, “Washington made me the artist and writer I am, and the work I make is inseparable from the landscape of this region. Silence, moss, and mountains are the quiet foundations of so much of who I am as both a maker and a person, and Washington has my heart—which is a migratory creature, so I do leave frequently—in a way that I know will be lifelong. So it feels very special to be honored by the (Washington State Book Awards).
And for future plans?
“I’m combining my two loves of the wilderness and creativity and setting out to become an embedded comics journalist working in long-term partnership with scientists and Indigenous groups, who are doing work around ecological resilience and repair in remote environments.
“I’m adjusting to my new reality where I’m more in-demand that I have bandwidth for, so am really looking for the right partnerships where I can be part of a team that I work with for many years. I’m shifting away from a model of working alone, because it has been way too isolating for me.”
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