People who know Tessa Hulls won’t be surprised by her initial reaction to learning she’d won a Pulitzer Prize for her first book, the graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts (Macmillan, 2024).

“I think I was in shock for a couple of months,” Hulls says. “I went into the backcountry for as long as I needed until I knew where the ground was again, and I didn’t come out until it was like, okay, I think I can face this.”

That’s because in addition to her work as a multidisciplinary artist and writer, Hulls is an explorer, and no, that’s not an overly romantic epithet—it’s the most straightforward way to describe a person who bikes, hikes, chefs, and teaches her way through as much of the outdoors as she can, learning and creating and collaborating as she goes. After news of the big win settled in, Hulls started to consider how best to share her light with her community, especially at this moment, as she is “doubling down” on living in both Seattle and Juneau, Alaska.

“The person that I am as an artist and writer is entirely because of the resources that were available to me with[in] the communities that fostered me and gave me chances in Seattle,” she says. “So, what I have are the resources of growing a career in a Lower 48 city, but the perspective and influence of wildness—and a very different set of community roles from living in Alaska. I’m trying to use my weird new spotlight and skeleton key to say, ‘What if, instead of saying this is something that is recognizing my career, it is a community resource?’”

Feeding Ghosts—an epic, black-and-white illustrated memoir that took 10 years to complete—traces three generations of inherited trauma and loss across China, the Bay Area, and beyond. In addition to the Pulitzer (the first graphic novel to win for memoir), it was recognized with a National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, a Libby Award for Best Graphic Novel, and glowing reviews.

“With all of the awards and all of the everything, I’m somebody who sort of turns sideways and disappears into the trees when people try and hang a bunch of accolades on me,” says Hulls, who declares she will never write another book and plans to focus on environmental justice and climate change moving forward. “I’m working to create this new career that doesn’t exist, becoming a comics journalist working with field scientists. So much of what I’ve done has been about social justice and racial justice in history, but what I want to do is go further upstream, because ultimately, this is a cliff that we’re all running towards.”