In September of 1885, the Chinese coal miners who were brought into Wyoming as strikebreakers were ambushed and driven out of the town of Rock Springs at gunpoint by white coal miners. Teow Lim Goh’s “Bitter Creek” revisits this dark episode—known today as the Rock Springs Massacre—revealing the stories beneath this violent, decade-long culmination of labor struggles and racial hostilities in the Union Pacific Coal Mines.

Through the eyes of the struggling railroad workers, their families, and the corporation working them to the bone, Teow Lim Goh creates an ode to buried history that blends epic tradition with modern composition and astonishing empathy to ask the question, “What turns ordinary people into monsters?”

This program is part of the 2025 Winter Read, a community-wide program. This year we’re reading “Four Treasures of the Sky,” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, set in 19th century Idaho and whose main characters hear of the Rock Springs Massacre as they face their own threats of violence in the small mining town of Pierce. Books will be available for pre-order from Torrey House Press, which is publishing the book in May 2025.

Teow Lim Goh is a poet and essayist who writes from the nexus of people and place. One of her ongoing projects is to recover the histories of Chinese immigrants in the American West. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, “Islanders” (2016) and “Faraway Places” (2021), and her essay collection “Western Journeys” (2022) was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction.

Author photo credit: Kelly Weaver.