The University of Arizona Press
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Time: 6 p.m., MST
Where: Tumamoc Hill Boathouse, 1675 W Anklam Rd, Tucson
What was it like to grow up in Tombstone, Arizona? Find out with Tucson Poet Laureate Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, who will be in conversation with Melani Martinez, author of The Molino on October 21, as part of the Tumamoc Author Series. Thoughtful, urgent, and deeply human, Reckon wrestles with questions of identity, place, and responsibility—inviting readers to confront what it means to live attentively in fraught and changing times. Whether reflecting on the natural world, social justice, or the quiet moments that shape our inner lives, Phillips’ voice offers insight, compassion, and challenge in equal measure. The two authors will explore the themes behind Reckon, the creative process, and the role of poetry as both witness and catalyst. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in conversation and connect with two of Tucson’s most compelling literary voices. Come listen, reflect, and reckon together.
This talk will be held at the boathouse, at the base of Tumamoc Hill. The event is presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center, and is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase, and the author will be available for signing following the talk.
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.
