The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Poetry Workshop Time: 4-5:45 p.m., MST
Reading Time: 6-6:30 p.m., MST
Place: Copper Queen Library, 6 Main St., Bisbee, AZ
Poet and author will lead a workshop and read at the Copper Queen Library in Bisbee. He will discuss how developing a new relationship to “the poetic unit” unlocked a process of generative revision and original writing that became his latest book Reckon. Techniques such as caesura, parataxis, volta and genre hybridity are defined and offered as possible tools for use by poets—all in an accessible and playful atmosphere. Logan Phillips is Tucson Poet Laureate. He is author of Sonoran Strange, alongside numerous poetry chapbooks and art books, including the NoVoGRAFíAS series (2009–present). A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.
This event is free but pre-registration is required. To register, send an email to: cqlprograms@bisbeeaz.gov.
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
