Logan Phillips is well known to many, but by different names. Some see him on the regular at Hotel Congress as DJ Dirtyverbs, some see him in the classroom as a teacher and others see him onstage displaying spoken word poetry about cultural justice and experiences as a person growing up on the border.
“I was growing up in an unincorporated Cochise County and went to school in Sierra Vista. I had a kind of complicated relationship with Sierra Vista and growing up there,” Phillips said. “The land of that place and the border influence are two things that I took for granted… I thought the whole world was that way, but it took until I was much older and living in other places for me to realize how special this place is and how much it is a part of me. I carry it wherever I go.”
Cochise County falls right on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. It continues to develop and has many more recourses now than when Phillips was living there.
“I always had a huge curiosity of getting out and as far away as I could,” he said. “I wanted to see the entire world, meet new people and have conversations in as many different languages as I could. That set me on a path that didn’t seem like a path at all at the time. All I knew was I wanted to be creative, I wanted to travel and I wanted to be fully bilingual. That was about it.”
Phillips said he felt limited starting out as a creative young man, mostly by his location, the lack of opportunities it provided and the gender roles set on him by the culture around him. Phillips left Cochise County and attended Northern Arizona University. He found his passion for poetry at his first campus poetry slam. He has been a performing poet ever since, but poetry isn’t Phillips only passion.
“Primarily I am a poet and a performer, [but] I also serve as a co-director of Spoken Futures, Inc., which is a youth center for poetry, exploration and social justice. This organization runs the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam that I co-founded in 2010 as a doorway to the world of literary arts in Southern Arizona. I work professionally as a DJ with the name DJ Dirtyverb. I do shows every Friday night at Club Congress, playing cumbia, Reggaeton, good dance music. I am also an educator—I teach in schools all around the country and in Mexico, and I teach spoken word at Eastpointe High school. Those are all the different hats I wear.”
The creator’s main goal, though, regardless of the various hats he wears, is to benefit and serve his community.
“All that I do is what I am and what I can offer,” Phillips said. “I believe that if I have a skill or an interest that can be of service to my community, then it is my obligation and pleasure to share it with my community.”
Phillips’ self-proclaimed “latest and greatest” work, a book called “Sonoran Strange,” focuses on the complex relationships and issues revolving around the border communities and our state of Arizona.
Follow Thea Van Gorp on Twitter.
