The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, May 23, 2026
Time: 3:30 p.m., MST
Where: The Historic Y, Outside Patio, 738 N. 5th Ave. Tucson, AZ
Logan Phillips, author of Reckon and Poet Laureate of Tucson, will read at Tucson Arts Poetry Series (TAPS) on May 23. He will read along with award winning writer, Geramee. Phillips is a seasoned performer and collaborator, who has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects. The event, sponsored by the Arizona State Poetry Society, will be hosted at The Historic Y on the outside patio. The event is free and open to the public.
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.
