Red Emma’s

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.

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.

Bry Reed is a Baltimore-born and bred artist passionate about cultivating her local artistic community. She's a Rubys Artist Grant awardee, a board member for Writers in Baltimore Schools, and a Fellowship Advisor with New Generations Scholars Youth Archival Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Beat and The Washington Post, and she co-edited the essay collection Surviving The Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies with Raven Hudson and Shuli Branson for PM Press. Additionally, she enjoys engaging with other artists, community members, and thinkers in public forums. She has been featured on panels in collaboration with CityLit Project, Greedy Reads, Red Emma's, The Clifton House, and other local art organizations.