The University of Arizona Press
March 2, 2026
We are thrilled to announce that the City of Tucson, in partnership with the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, has appointed Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, as the 2026-2029 Tucson Poet Laureate!
The City of Tucson announcement describes the committee’s decision: “[Logan Phillips] frames poetry as an important tool for building connection and resilience amid current social and environmental challenges and describes laureateship as an honor in the city where he is raising his children. Selected by a seven-person panel of literary community members, Phillips was chosen for his experience, artistic strength, and leadership.”
Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.
As Poet Laureate, Phillips plans to launch the ¡Somos Uno! Poetry & Storytelling Series, a set of multilingual open mics with writing workshops in small businesses, libraries, and underused spaces to support citywide cultural initiatives and document Tucson’s evolving story. This series would be part of the City of Tucson’s ¡Somos Uno! A Cultural Heritage Strategy, a 2023 initiative to steward the City’s rich cultural heritage, jointly led by the Office of Mayor Regina Romero and the Office of the City Manager.
The Laureate will also give an inaugural reading at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15 at 4:00 p.m. in the Student Union Kiva Room, appearing alongside Arizona’s newly appointed Poet Laureate, Laura Tohe, who was named to the post this year by Governor Katie Hobbs.
Congratulations Logan!
About Logan Phillips’ recently published hybrid memoir, 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.
