The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, April 25, 2026
Workshop Time: 3:30-4:45 p.m., MST
Workshop Place: Campus Center Building, Pima Community College downtown campus, 1255 N Stone Ave, Tucson, AZ
Reading Time: 7 p.m., MST
Reading Place: Amethyst Room, Pima Community College downtown campus, 1255 N Stone Ave, Tucson, AZ
Logan Phillips author of Reckon will teach and read at the Tucson Poetry Festival on April 25. Phillips will lead the workshop titled “Lush Desert: Contrast, Juxtaposition, and Metaphor,” that will study metaphor, contradiction and juxtaposition as techniques that open language as more than a sum of its parts. Participants will read craft essays, deconstruct contemporary poems and use generative exercises to explore how dichotomy can open unique liminal spaces in our own poems. Throughout, writers will stay grounded in our context as creators in the Sonoran Desert, itself a contradictory space: a lush desert, a beautiful danger, a cultural landscape of border wall construction and humanitarian aid. Register here; free but donations are welcome on registration page. The Saturday evening reading is free and open to the public.
Phillips is Tucson Poet Laureate. 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. The Saturday night reading 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.
