The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, February 19, 2026
Times and Places:
9:15-10:15 a.m. Reading and Author Talk at Cochise College, Douglas Campus Union, 4190 West Highway 80, Community Room 502
3-4 p.m. Multimedia and Poetry Craft Talk at Cochise College, Sierra Vista Campus Union, 901 N. Colombo Ave
Reckon, will read from his new book and lead a craft talk on two Cochise College Campuses. How can a writer engage images? How can a visual artist leverage writing? Phillips’ hybrid memoir includes a mix of literary forms (poetry, essay, screenplay and more) as well as design elements such as collage, visual sampling of archival material, newspapers, typography and original photography. Written using design software (Adobe InDesign) rather than standard word processing software, Reckon is part of an artistic legacy of books that transgress genre by mixing media. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects. The events are free and open to the public; please RSVP here.
About the book:
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
