Logan Phillips: Reckon

Logan Phillips discusses and signs Reckon, his hybrid memoir set in Tombstone, Arizona, where he returns to the legendary town of his childhood to confront the myths of the Old West.

ABOUT THE BOOK

What does it mean to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona, a town where myth, masculinity, and whiteness have long performed a narrative of American nationhood? In Reckon (2026), artist and poet Logan Phillips returns to the fabled site of his childhood to confront the frontier stories he inherited as a boy: gunfights, outlaws, Hollywood cowboys, and the racial and gendered power structures that sustained them. This hybrid memoir blends essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings, and screenplay fragments to examine sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and the contradictions of loving a landscape built on erasure and “slathered in M**der.” Moving through the Tombstone of the 1980s and 90s, where daily reenactments and museum displays reinforced a nostalgic masculinity, Phillips exposes a history far more complex than the one he was raised on and maps how empire and patriarchy shape belonging, narrative, and American nationhood.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker in Tucson, Arizona, and is author of Sonoran Strange and the NoVoGRAFíAS series.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Mary Stephens is the founder and director of Border/Arte, whose work interrogates the racialized and gendered production of nationhood in the US/MX borderlands. Her practice is rooted in site-specific cultural organizing and bi-national artistic collaborations.

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