“My career has been defined by embracing tangents”

In Spring 2025, we sat down with Tessa Hulls just days after she won the Pulitzer Prize for her comic memoir, Feeding Ghosts. She is only the second comics creator – the first was Art Spiegelman – to have won the prize. Hulls has also been honoured with the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for the first book in any genre, and won an Eisner Award. Her work also won the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award presented by the Cleveland Foundation, the first comic to win the award in its 90-year history. During our meeting, we explored the beauty of her story which draws upon the lives of three generations of women who carry with them the trauma of the Chinese cultural revolution, and how authors who have come before her, including Maxine Hong Kingston inspired her storytelling. Throughout the interview one feels Hulls’ obligation to create art for survival but even more one feels her joy in that act. Such duty and delight led to the creation of a new comic, Feeding Ghosts which has instigated a tectonic shift for the comics medium

Comics · Hull · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism