The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, May 31, 2026
Time: 1:30-1:30 p.m., PDT
Where: Poetry Stage, BART Plaza, 2170 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA
Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, will speak at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley on May 31. He will be part of the panel, “The Future Is Unsettled: Decolonial Poetics” with Jason Bayani, Osmani Ochoa, and Daniel P. Williams, moderated by Dena Rod. The event is free and open to the public. Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.
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.
