A journal of humanity and human experience
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Subscribe now to and get our latest issue featuring the winners of the 2024 BLR Literary Prizes.
Join us online on Thursday, May 23, 2024 at 7 PM ET for a night of readings and interviews with the 2024 winners of the BLR Literary Prizes, featured in Issue 46.
As featured on NPR's Morning Edition
NPR’s Neda Ulaby reported on BLR‘s 20th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri, along with author Celeste Ng. Long before Celeste Ng reached stratospheric popularity with Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, she was an emerging author, whose story “Girls, at Play” appeared in BLR and then won a Pushcart Prize.
Whiting Award Winner
BLR was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize for
“excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community.”
BLR Off the Page
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The intersect of poetry and nursing has always fascinated me. Though I now identify more as a writer than a nurse, the skills I learned in nursing school have served me well as a writer
He spent his days, like most boys in the neighborhood, walking around, looking to get something for nothing. But today was fight day.
Thank goodness every so often
a monument closes down
for renovation…
like light is/
like my speckled skin: brim/
and brink. verge.
Clinical care provides the subject matter for many of my poems, and some of the themes I explore in them – for example, empathy, compassion, uncertainty, loss, anger, and guilt – have driven a process of self-discovery that I think has made me a better doctor.
Deven Kolluri reads “Perlmutter Cancer Center,”a poem by Abba Belgrave
I drive slowly and I know people are angry at me—hitting their horns and cursing, giving me the finger. I just smile and keep going.
Associate Editor
To the left of the scar, I could see the new heart beating beneath my skin. The new double pump song of perfection replacing the one wrong beat, a single ventricle, I’d had before.
Praise & Recognition
``With every issue, Bellevue Literary Review probes our understanding of the human body and mind in new ways. It is essential reading for anyone who deals with sickness and health, anyone interested in narrative medicine, anyone who simply needs a dose of deep grace and humanity.”
“The editors have produced a journal of uncommon literary quality.”
“I subscribe and receive literally hundreds of magazines every year. Of all those magazines, none stands out more than Bellevue Literary Review.”
“These two non-fiction pieces in BLR are powerful, honest, and heartrending. They lifted me up because of the truths released onto the pages. Both deal with problems our family is suffering through, so on a personal level, the authors are helping me grapple.”
“BLR's contents are at once practically instructive, and yet intangibly inspiring and utterly gripping. I can’t imagine my work as a writer, or a doctor, without it.”
“After reading it cover to cover, I came away walloped by the breadth and depth of the pain it highlights.”
“No human thing is more universal than illness, in all its permutations, and no literary publication holds more credibility on the subject than Bellevue Literary Review.”
“A kaleidoscope of creativity. . . The selections are unsentimental and often unpredictable.”
“What is most impressive about BLR, though, is how the editors can stretch their own boundaries.”
“Ask any healthcare worker, ask any patient who has come back from illness and fear, and you will hear stories that might change your life. That's what BLR offers.”
“BLR is loyal to its theme but never constrained by it, uncovering boundless tonal and narrative possibilities as it contemplates the body as a physical entity, probes the manifestation of mental illness, or reckons with how the racialized and gendered body is perceived.”
“BLR is open to many modes and styles of work; it has no house style except humanity (though excellent editing doesn't hurt either).”