The University of Arizona Press
Date: Friday, April 17, 2026
Time: Doors open at 5:30 p.m., show begins at 6 p.m., MST
Place: The McKinley Club Yard, 2811 N 7th Ave, Phoenix, AZ
Reckon is the featured poet at Fruity Poetry Night at The McKinley Club Yard in Phoenix on April 17. Hosted by artists-in-residence Patrick De Leon and Lan Lesmeister, this very special open-mic is for queer poets, writers, and storytellers from across Arizona. Sign up must be in person with performer present. The event is free and open to the public, and sponsored by thems.
Logan Phillips is the Tucson Poet Laureate and a cultural worker based in Tucson (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). 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.
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
