"Reckon" Book Release and Reading

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?

Join us for a reading of "Reckon" by Logan Phillips, followed by a conversation with producer Mary Stephens about the role of poetry and literature during a moment of resurgent white supremacy and political violence, and about how men can meaningfully confront the legacies they inherit. 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. Together, Phillips and Stephens bring a sharp lens to the demands of this moment to reckon honestly with the histories they carry, the violences they benefit from, and the responsibilities they must claim. This event invites all of us, and white audiences in particular, to step more fully into the work of memory, repair, healing, and collective accountability.

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.

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