Margaret Juhae Lee in Conversation with Tessa Hulls
Past Event
March 23,2024
Join Mesa alum Margaret Juhae Lee with graphic novelist Tessa Hulls for a conversation about family legacy, immigration, and lost history—through the lens of Margaret and Tessa’s recent memoirs.
In Margaret’s intimate and touching debut memoir, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House 2024) journalist Margaret Juhae Lee uncovers her family’s lost history that had been buried in the darkness of Korea’s colonial decades. Margaret was a Mesa resident in 2023.
Tessa’s evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts (MacMillan), offers a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
Margaret Juhae Lee is an Oakland-based writer and a former literary editor of The Nation magazine. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. She is also a Tin House scholar, and has been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, the Anderson Center, and Mineral School. In 2020, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha. Her articles, reviews, and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and The Rumpus.
Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. As the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants who landed in a tiny town of 350 people, she grew up with no models of how she fit within American culture. Her family didn’t have TV and the internet didn’t yet exist, so she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills with a backpack full of books (she still does this). This fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice.
Co-presented with Point Reyes Books. Held in the Dance Palace Church Space in Point Reyes Station.