Join Philadelphia authors Bitter Kalli (Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation, 2025) and Chi-ming Yang (Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse, 2025) for a community conversation about their new books. They will read from each others’ work and reflect on their shared interests in horses, blackness, queer-trans resistance, art, and community organizing. What can the history of horse-human encounters offer us in a time of fascist repression and genocide? How do hybrid forms of storytelling liberate us from the lineages of collective and childhood trauma?

Bitter Kalli is a writer and land worker originally from Brooklyn, NY. Through their work, Bitter seeks to create opportunities for liberatory storytelling, land stewardship, and collective food sovereignty. Bitter’s writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Arts.Black, and Architectural Digest, among others. They have received support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the Schuylkill Environmental Center, the Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Columbia University.  As a teaching artist, Bitter has worked with students at organizations including the School for Poetic Computation, the Painted Bride Arts Center, and the Rolling Library, as well as through independently produced events and workshops. Bitter is also the founder of Star Apple Farm and Nursery, a project focused on increasing access to Caribbean and Southeast Asian heritage crops.

Chi-ming Yang is author of Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse (2025), an homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Bringing to view a selection of Butler's unpublished writings and drawings, this book traces her fascination with human-alien symbiosis to her early empathy with horses and other marginalized creatures. Yang is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. Over the past decade, her scholarship has explored the politics and aesthetics of orientalism, abolition, blackness and Atlantic slavery, and cross-species encounters in poetry and art. 

This workshop will take place in the Literature Department at Parkway Central Library. The event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.