RECKON Stage Reading - Philadelphia Fringe Festival

RECKON Stage Reading

Logan Phillips

Interdisciplinary, Performance Art, Solo Show, Storytelling & Spoken Word

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.

With an original, searing voice, RECKON is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.

“‘This isn’t poetry, this is the news.’ I’ve never read a book like Logan Phillips’ Reckon. It’s almost not accurate to call it a book—it transcends genre, mixing history, personal narrative, myth, memoir, and poetry. Here is an ‘American’ truly reckoning with his family’s past, the country’s past, and in the process, creating a roadmap for others to follow." –Javier Zamora

"Flying through masculine silence, RECKON is the owl." –Sesshu Foster

Details

Run Time: 60 mins

Ticket Price: $20 (PWYW), $20

PWYC Options $0+

Venue: Taller Puertorriqueño The Perch Music and Arts Workshop

Dates: September 17, 2026 - September 21, 2026

Buy Tickets

September 17, 2026 7.30pm

2600 N 5th St

General Admission: $20 (PWYW)

PWYC Options

September 21, 2026 7.30pm

2321 Emerald St

General Admission: $20

PWYC Options

About the Artist

Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona. In 2026 he was appointed Tucson Poet Laureate.

Author of the books RECKON (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Sonoran Strange (West End Press, 2015), as well as the ongoing NoVoGRAFíAS series, Phillips works to create new opportunities for the intersection of poetry and wider society.

As a bilingual poet, performer, educator and DJ he tours his art throughout the US, Latin America, Europe and beyond. Phillips holds collaboration as a core creative practice and contributes to a wide range of performance, music, education, land-based and community-centered projects.

Born to a family of Irish-Slavic descent and raised in the Arizona / Sonora borderlands, Phillips lived in and around Mexico City 2006-2011, where he contributed to organizing and hosting the country’s first regular poetry slam series.

Also in 2007 Logan began playing house parties and mezcalería-speakeasies in Cuernavaca as DJ Dirtyverbs, specializing in cumbia and world music.

Teaching and facilitating has been an important part of Phillips’ artistic practice since 2005. He has worked as a classroom teacher at the elementary, high school and university levels.

Phillips served as Cofounder & Codirector of Spoken Futures, Inc. whose programs included the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, 2010-2019, and currently works as a teaching artist with The University of Arizona Poetry Center and with schools across the United States.

For more information visit dirtyverbs.com

Logan PhillipsPoet / Performerlogan@dirtyverbs.com
Adam Cooper-TeránTechnical Directoradam@antral.net

Accessibility & Content Considerations

Contact the Fringe Festival Box Office for up to date accessibility information.

This event is appropriate for ages 13+

Adult Language

Covid-19 Safety policy

This event does not require masks to be worn