The University of Arizona Press
Date: First show, Thursday, September 17, 2026
Date: Second show, Monday, September 21, 2026
Time: 7:30 p.m., EDT
Place: Taller Puertorriqueño, The Perch Music and Arts Workshop, 2321 Emerald St, Philadelphia, PA
brings his dynamic spoken word performance of Reckon to Philadelphia for two shows in September at Taller Puertorriqueño. The performance features immersive sound design and video projection created in collaboration with Philadelphia-based artist Adam Cooper-Terán. This multimedia stage reading from the book is a first look at the work-in-progress of the full theater adaptation, a one man show being commissioned by Arizona Arts Live, debuting in Tucson and New York City in 2028. Standard tickets for each show are $20 or pay what you can, and available from Fringe Arts here.
Phillips’ hybrid memoir includes a mix of literary forms (poetry, essay, screenplay and more) as well as design elements such as collage, visual sampling of archival material, newspapers, typography and original photography. Written using design software (Adobe InDesign) rather than standard word processing software, Reckon is part of an artistic legacy of books that transgress genre by mixing media. 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.
