MOUNTED: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation by Bitter Kalli

Saddling up

For Kalli, this project is as personal as it is historical, and as equestrian as it is literary. Their relationship to horses has always been intertwined with literature itself. As a child, Kalli enjoyed The Saddle Club series while watching children riding through Prospect Park, before eventually learning to ride themselves. Later, as the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, they found themself conflicted—caught between the joy of riding and the stark realities of racial isolation and systemic inequity. Their perspective was sharpened by witnessing mounted police at protests following Freddie Gray’s murder—a painful reminder of how horses have been used as breathing tools of state-sanctioned violence, particularly targeting Black lives. Out of those tensions grew a book that weaves together memoir, cultural criticism, and archival history.

MOUNTED consists of fifteen essays that shift from playful and critical to intimate and scholarly. Kalli is not simply an observer or researcher, but an embodied practitioner whose lived experience informs every page. Kalli reflects on their own queerness and spirituality, while also tracing the historical relationship between animals and enslaved Black people—analyzing, for example, Frederick Douglass’s speeches on labor and agricultural animals. The book’s historical scope spans from the early 18th century to the present day (although not organized chronologically), and is structured like the weaving on its cover; layering time, place, and identity to build an expansive and interconnected collection.

The presence of Black cowboys

Culturally speaking, Kalli highlights the presence of Black cowboys in Philadelphia, drawing attention to a local stable and North Philly’s deep equestrian connection. They also examine how artists like Beyoncé, Lil Nas X, and Diedrick Brackens challenge equestrian whiteness and elitism through their work. Brackens’s weaving When no softness came appears on the cover, underscoring the book’s central metaphor of weaving: a process that mirrors how Kalli interlaces art, history, and lived experience into something new. And when asked of a direct Jamaican and/or Filipino connection, Kalli noted how Jamaican dancehall once adopted the personas of American cowboys.

At a moment when Black cowboy culture is gaining renewed visibility in mainstream music and media (à la Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter), MOUNTED arrives as both timely and necessary. It insists that Black equestrian histories are not just part of the past or the rural, but are indeed actively unfolding in contested urban spaces today, where even the act of keeping horses can be criminalized. The book illuminates the ways horses remain at the center of larger questions about freedom, race, belonging, and resistance.

Although Kalli is no longer mounted on horseback, they have mounted themselves onto the page with this seminal first publication. Beyond writing, they are a landworker and the founder of Star Apple Nursery, a project dedicated to stewarding Caribbean and Southeast Asian heritage crops. As a child of the Atlantic Ocean now based in Philadelphia, they continue to live at the intersection of land, art, and cultural memory.

MOUNTED is more than a collection of essays—it is a weaving. From childhood media to queer spirituality, from enslaved labor to contemporary art, Kalli threads together varied histories and experiences into a narrative that challenges us to rethink one of our most enduring interspecies relationships.

A playlist inspired by MOUNTED is in progress and will soon be shared across social media, extending the book’s weavings into sound. For now, the book is available wherever Amistad books are sold.