FEEDING GHOSTS Wins a Pulitzer!

We are wishing a HUGE congratulations to Tessa Hulls for winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography for FEEDING GHOSTS!

In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.

Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school—and promptly had a mental breakdown. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.

Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi’s unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home, traveling to the farthest corners of the globe. At age thirty, it started to feel less like freedom and more like running away, so Tessa returned home to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, FEEDING GHOSTS is Hulls’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, FEEDING GHOSTS exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

---

“The shadowy, close-hatched drawings detail the landmarks of Sun Yi’s past and render expressionistic portraits of emotional truths, filling panels with maze-like layouts reminiscent of David B. The result is a revelatory work as layered as the history it explores.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Artist/writer/adventurer Hulls presents her debut graphic memoir in 400 black-and-white dense pages that explore (and expose) mental illness, dysfunctional bonds, inherited trauma, and cultural disconnects across three generations… Almost ten years later, audiences are invited to ‘enter this story’—detailed, vulnerable, harrowing—and bear witness to Hulls ‘releasing [her ghosts] into the light.'”—Booklist, starred review

“A work that glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Click here to learn more.