Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture.

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life.

In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place—from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of “equestrian chic” was born, to the reclamation—or, in Lil Nas X’s word, yeehawification—of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them?

Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of “horse people”—the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness—to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image.

BIO

Bitter Kalli was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Their essays and criticism have been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, and BOMB Magazine, among others. They are a landworker and founder of Star Apple Nursery, a project focused on the stewardship of Caribbean and Southeast Asian heritage crops. Bitter is a child of the Atlantic Ocean. They are based in Philadelphia. 

REVIEWS

“Bitter Kalli’s Mounted is a tour de force: an epic journey into the ancient heart of the human-equine relationship, these essays offer readers an exhilaratingly panoramic and achingly intimate exploration of our shared animal life—the long history of horse and human entanglement, a history both mundane and mythic, as much about exploitation as emancipation. The thrilling pleasure of this collection feels like riding wild and free in the company of a nimble friend: it gives the vivifying joy of being the rider and the horse, all at once.” -- Elaine Castillo, author of Moderation and How to Read Now

“Reading Mounted moved me deeply. Bitter Kalli weaves history, memory, and identity into a stunning reflection on Blackness, queerness, and liberation. This book made me see horses—and freedom—in a whole new light.” -- Kareem Rosser, author of When You're Ready and Crossing the Line

"In Mounted, Bitter Kalli tends and tills at the fence between liberation and harness. These essays gallop. They both dig deep into the ground we stand on while breaking open the space into which we might reach, and it is thrilling to follow this work. While reading I felt the horizon of possibilities for freedom—of thought, movement, and future—get further and further away, with Bitter at the helm, leading us on. All I wanted to do was go with them." — Johanna Hedva, author of How to Tell When We Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

[H]  Amistad Press  /  August 19, 2025

0.9" H x 8.4" L x 5.5" W (0.6 lbs) 192 pages