The University of Arizona Press
June 26, 2025
Logan Phillips, author of Reckon (forthcoming in spring 2026), will be Writer-in-Residence at Pima County Public Libraries (PCPL), July 5–August 12, 2025. This summer, Logan presents a “Tell Your Story” workshop to kick off his residency on Saturday, July 5, at Valencia Library for writers age 16+. He hosts a workshop and open mic for writers of all ages at MegaMania, PCPL’s ComiCon style event at Pima Community College’s Downtown Campus on Saturday, July 19. Logan also offers two workshops for kids aged 8–13 at Santa Rosa Library: Youth Writing Jam on Wednesday, August 13, and Make Your Own Book on Wednesday, August 20. Additionally, he is available for a limited number of one-on-one consultations with writers (sign up here) and a writing group based at Valencia Library.
Holding collaboration as a core creative practice, Phillips has contributed to a wide range of performance, music, and community-centered education projects in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. Phillips is a volunteer organizer with Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition (TBOSC), an intercultural effort to strengthen Indigenous sovereignty at the base of S-Cuk Ṣon / Sentinel Peak / ‘A’ Mountain.
About Reckon:
What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
