Dr. Valentino Zullo, Anisfield-Wolf Postdoctoral Fellow at Ursuline College, will lead a discussion of Tessa Hulls’ AWBA-winning memoir Feeding Ghosts at Mishkan Or, Edith Anisfield Wolf’s original congregation
In her award-winning debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival―then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
Feeding Ghosts won this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for memoir, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Eisner Award for graphic memoir.
Refreshments provided.
This discussion is part of Cleveland Book Fest and is co-sponsored by the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.