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.
“I have little nut caches everywhere and I have a lot of them on Capitol Hill,” she told us. “I went to Elliott Bay and Dance Church yesterday. I used to work a lot out of Volunteer Park Conservatory. Diana Adams from Vermillion is an unsung hero. I try to go say hi to her every time I’m in town.”
She told us she did some research for Feeding Ghosts on Capitol Hill, but wrote and drew a lot of it in Port Townsend, then in Rainier Beach, and finally finished at INScape in the International District.
In 2020, amid the growing protests after the death of George Floyd, she returned to Seattle to cover CHOP as an on-the-ground journalist. Her comics posted on social media went viral. Over three weeks, she posted informational graphics that she hoped would convey the complexity of what was happening at CHOP.
“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 told Forbes last month.
But she’s since grown dubious of social media’s ability to support nuanced conversation. In a 2023 post, she said, “I have no faith in social media as an educational tool and have come to believe that condensing complicated issues into easily digestible Instagram slides does more harm than good. Social media incentivizes the performance of due diligence at the cost of actual learning.”
Reflecting on CHOP, she told us she feels “our culture has only moved further into not being able to talk about the complexity of things.”
“CHOP did get reduced to soundbite and a token. Lasting change didn’t really come to pass.”
Reflecting on Capitol Hill’s evolution since she lived here, she feels some sadness about how much harder it is for a young artist to be here.
“Capitol Hill circa 13 years ago is why I ended up with the support to have such a strange multidisciplinary career. I was in Vermillion all the time talking to other creatives, Canoe Social Club, The Project Room.”
“It was a really, really enriching place.”
“There just aren’t the same community support networks now. Artists need low cost of living above all else. It gives them space to breathe.”
She mentioned Common Area Maintenance in Belltown as a place that’s taking up that mantle, “questioning some of the established models”.
Cities inevitably move forward and Tessa will too. After the decade-long effort to produce her first book (she’s saying it’ll be her only book) and a marathonic sprint of a book tour, she’s about to head to the woods.
“I’ll be outside for pretty much all of June,” she said.
She’ll use time off the grid to process what the Pulitzer means for her.
“When I biked across the country solo in 2011, it taught me that the way I find clarity is being alone and in motion in isolated places,” she said.
“If I’m trying to work on a project or solve some creative problem the last place you’ll find me is at a desk.”
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