A journal of humanity and human experience

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Contest and general submissions are OPEN. Submit to the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes by July 1, 2025.
Join us April 30th for our annual BLR Winning Words Spring Reading, featuring the prizewinners and honorable mentions of the 2025 BLR Literary Prizes. (Free, online)

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

DISCOVER MORE

Her Marked Black Body

The macabre moon / Once lunged at me / It hisses red / Hangs voyeuristically / Wants me to stand in its balkanized light.

Geese

Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does it quietly, because Rosie works third shift and needs her sleep. Before he hurt his back, he didn’t understand that pain is another person who travels with you…

Forty-One Months

Thato is a small sad boy who has come to stay at the safe home in Lesotho, up in the cloudvoid in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong district. His mother is dead and his father is off working somewhere…

When the Self Goes, It Goes

into the folds of the purple iris which, at dawn, / becomes the hub for spider silk, filament after / filament…

By My Own Hand

Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.

The Father of Joan of Arc

Two months after the loss of my only child, whose death—for which I am responsible—came in an unspeakable manner, I stand in line at the gas station, waiting to pay for my gas.

Without Fear of Being Burned

I hear you just beyond reach / of the flickering light of / the TV, which you’ve kindled / as a kind of controlled burn

Monitor

Now it’s loose in the house, and out back. / lop away its extremities, they swell back fat.

The Gift of the Spanish Lady

The last words Mrs. Sommers said to her husband were: “And don’t let that girl have the run of the house.”

Praise & Recognition