Tessa Hulls ’07 won in the memoir category, and Amy Reading ’98 was a finalist for biography.
By Cara Nixon
May 5, 2025
Tessa Hulls ’07 spent nearly a decade tracking her Chinese heritage through her mother and grandmother, creating a genre-bending graphic memoir about family, love, grief, and exile. This week, that work paid off in a huge way: the book won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize.
Judges called Feeding Ghosts, which won in the memoir category, “an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women—the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”
Feeding Ghosts previously won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for best first book and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for memoir. It was named best book of the year by multiple outlets, including National Public Radio, Time, and Forbes.
Last fall, Tessa visited the Reed campus to discuss the process of creating her graphic memoir. While a Reed student, Tessa studied studio art. For over 10 years, an abstract mural she painted for her senior thesis lived in the Gray Campus Center entrance hall. These days, Tessa says she’s never making another book—rather, she’s setting out to become a comics journalist, hoping to work with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits working in remote environments.
In addition, Amy Reading ’98 was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in the biography category. She wrote The World She Edited: Katherine S. White at The New Yorker—judges called it “a meticulous rendering of the life of the pioneering but unheralded magazine editor who helped refashion America’s mid-century culture by identifying and publishing some of the country’s notable literary figures.” The book was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Tessa joins other Reedies, Edward Cony ’48 and Gary Snyder ’51, who won Pulitzers for national reporting (1961) and poetry (1975), respectively, but she is the first to win in the memoir category. Other Pulitzer finalists include Elizabeth Rush ’06 for general nonfiction in 2019 and Peter S. Goodman ’89, whose work on the 2008 financial crisis for The New York Times was recognized in the public service category in 2009.