Tessa Hulls
Tessa Hulls
Tessa Hulls
Tessa Hulls has established herself as a distinctive voice in contemporary memoir through her unflinching exploration of family, identity, and inherited trauma. Her work is characterized by a lyrical, introspective quality paired with meticulous visual storytelling that refuses easy answers or comfortable resolutions. Hulls brings the intimacy of personal narrative to bear on larger questions about how we understand our parents, our pasts, and ourselves—themes that have earned her significant recognition within the literary community.
Hulls’s Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir secured the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, a distinction that speaks to the profound impact of her graphic narrative approach. By combining words and images, Hulls creates a uniquely layered reading experience that captures the complexity of memory itself, where visual and textual elements work in concert to convey what might resist traditional prose expression. Her Pulitzer recognition places her among the most acclaimed contemporary memoirists and underscores how graphic memoir has become a vital form for exploring the deepest recesses of personal and family history.
What makes Hulls’s achievement particularly noteworthy is the way her work bridges different audiences and traditions—those who follow literary memoir prizes alongside readers who champion graphic narrative as a literary form. Feeding Ghosts stands as testament to the power of hybrid storytelling to illuminate the most difficult truths we carry forward from one generation to the next.