The cowboy poet opens a copy of his new book “Reckon.” He stands before an intimate audience gathered at dusk in a century old boathouse built of red brick and volcanic stone harvested from the surrounding desert. He pulls the mic away from his face.
He takes a deep breath. Pauses.
“COME SEE this FAMILY!” Logan Phillips booms, throwing his head back as he shouts. He brings the mic closer and reads the next line more quietly. “Recovering CATHOLICS now PARENTING, aided only by love, an electric can opener and residual LSD in their spines.”
Logan wears his signature cowboy hat and boots, a white button up blouse and black jeans. Black eyeliner boldens his eyes, and silver earrings dangle against his cheeks as he performs.
“YES! The REAL old 80s raising up BABY to be a BOY in TOMBSTONE,” he says in his showman persona, reading each line as he’s penned — loudly for all caps and softer for lowercase lines.
It’s Oct. 21, and Logan is the first guest speaker of the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Author Series this year, at the Tumamoc Hill Boathouse on the base of the bluff overlooking Tucson’s city lights and mountains.
Logan is 43, born and raised in Tombstone, a tourist town famous for its history of gunfights and Wild West culture. He is a poet, performer, musician, DJ, educator and a community organizer. But if you ask him, it all falls under one umbrella.
“I describe myself as a cultural worker,” he says. “Because to me, ‘cultural worker’ describes the ways that an artist engages socially to create more room in one’s context for art to be experienced. And a culture worker is both an organizer, an artist and an educator.”
Logan was named Tucson’s poet laureate in the spring and has since started hosting Poets in the Park, a reading series at different Tucson parks that offers writers a space to share their art. The series is his official programming as poet laureate, under the city’s ¡Somos Uno! campaign, which works to uplift and preserve Tucson’s cultural heritage.
His goal is to activate spaces that are free and accessible to people from all walks of life. He’s intentional about hosting each event in a different side of town, to draw people who might not otherwise attend a poetry event.
Poets in the Park
Two upcoming poetry readings
Tucson Stories: Sunday, Nov. 22, 2026, 3:30 p.m. at Udall Park, 7290 E. Tanque Verde Rd.
Cultivating Culture: Sunday, Feb. 7, 2026, 3:30 p.m. at Verdugo Park, 902 S Verdugo Ave.
For more information and to RSVP visit Logan Phillips’ website: https://www.dirtyverbs.com/poets-in-the-park
“Poetry belongs to everyone,” he says. “And belongs everywhere, not just in academic spaces or in books. But in the stories we tell to each other, in our private moments, and how we as a community articulate who we are, what we believe and where we’re going.”
Tyler Meier is executive director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. He has known Logan for more than 10 years. He has watched him work as an educator teaching youth to find their voice through poetry and as a poet and community organizer.
Phillips’ choice to activate public parks is “democratizing” art, Meier said. He said Logan’s decision to host poetry readings in parks is “a beautiful intentional choice,” that helps people reclaim and reconnect with public outdoor spaces.
“This laureateship work is kind of like the literary version of the mural model of saying this is available to everybody,” he said. “And it’s in your neighborhood or in a park that’s near your neighborhood.”
“The world is still being made”
In “Reckon”, Logan explores his connection to the land, and reflects on how his upbringing shaped who he is today. The poems touch on his experiences growing up in a town with a history of outlaws and gunfights.
Logan was raised by a mother who taught in a public school and a father who worked as a state park ranger at the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park museum.
His book has pages with pixelated drawings of the landscape and few words, images of old Tombstone Epitaph newspaper clippings, and blurry photos of Tombstone and of him as a baby, often with his parents.
On a small corner of a page is a poem he wrote when he was 9.
The title of the poem is “Camping.”
A young Logan describes being out in the wilderness during a camping trip to the Dragoon Mountains. “Hearing the wind blow through the trees. I feel at home. I feel needed here. I am happy here. I am free, free, free,” he wrote.
Now a father of twins, he reflects on how he is raising his own children to care for the earth.
“Maybe it means we’re here to help this desert survive us,” he writes in his book. “So I will teach my children to love the people, to love this land.”
For Logan, becoming a parent clarified “how short a lifetime is, and how quick a generation passes.”
“This land was the breadbasket that fed people living in the Tucson basin for all those millennia. And should be honored as such,” he says. “And I want my children and all of our children to understand that the world is still being made. History isn’t over.”
Everyone can contribute to healing the wounds humans have inflicted in nature, even those who are not responsible for those wounds, he says. Those who have “inadvertently benefitted from that wounding,” he adds.
Logan is contributing in part by volunteering with Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition, a group that advocates to keep the land near where “A” Mountain and the Santa Cruz meet as open space.
Protecting the birthplace of Tucson
The Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition is made up of volunteer organizers who have worked to protect the land at the base of “A” Mountain and along the Santa Cruz River from new development.
The region/area, just west of Interstate 10 near downtown Tucson, was historically the home of Indigenous people who farmed and were sustained by the river, until settlers displaced these communities and drained the aquifer and the river. For nine years, the area was used as a Tucson landfill.
The language used to describe the land matters, Logan says.
“If we refer to that land as the “A” Mountain Landfill, then we are essentially saying that 4,000 years of Indigenous history doesn’t matter because of what was done to the land for nine years in the 50s,” Logan says.
The coalition was started after Caterpillar built its mining center in that area in 2019. By then, it was too late to stop the new development, but neighbors and Tohono O’odham community leaders, whose ancestors once lived in that area, have organized to prevent more development from coming in.
Rebecca Perez, an organizer with the coalition, has worked alongside Logan and more than a dozen other volunteers. Logan has helped by serving as a liaison between the group and the Rio Nuevo board, Perez says.
“He has a great strategic mind for organizing,” Perez says of Logan. “He’s developed relationships with board members, regularly monitors their meetings and communications, the actions that they’re taking.”
Rio Nuevo is a special tax district funded by state sales tax money to help redevelop downtown Tucson. The area the board oversees includes the Tucson Birthplace land. Voters approved the creation of the district in 1999.
Logan also has helped organize poetry readings on this land and has facilitated what the coalition calls “Walk and Talks,” where they invite people to visit the area and learn about its history.
Perez has participated in some of Logan’s poetry writing workshops and attended his performances.
“It opens you up to messages from the land, from the earth, from the environment,” Perez says. “It’s such a beautiful way to share history, personal history, history of place. So I would say, his poetry is like a vehicle for connecting people’s minds and hearts and bodies to place.”
“I stay for the rain”
At Armory Park on Oct. 10, more than 100 people listen intently as poet after poet takes the mic to perform. Rows of chairs are filled, while others prefer to sit on a blanket on the lawn.
Logan introduces each poet, and tells the audience about all 25 poets and which local poetry events they host.
Dark grey clouds above the park threaten to burst.
About halfway into the event, it starts to rain. Logan takes to the mic, and welcomes the rain. It’s needed in the desert, he says.
As it starts to pour, Logan invites the crowd to move closer and find shelter under Armory Park’s new performance pavilion. The space instantly becomes more intimate.
With the sound of rain in the backdrop, Lindsey Curley performs a fitting poem.
“When I say I stay for the rain, I also mean, I stay for the people,” she says.
The sun sets. The storm grows. Trees sway in the wind. People make their way out of the park after a night of community connection, poetry and time in nature.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
