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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 27 highlights
An exploration of our environment’s fragile nature, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year. // continue reading
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BLR Editor Danielle Ofri on “Why Medicine Needs Literary Magazines”
“Maybe a literary journal is not so much pages bound onto a spine, but rather a community of people—writers, readers, listeners, thinkers—who find solace in the comforts and confrontations of the written word.” // continue reading
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 26 highlights
The circus comes to Bellevue, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year. // continue reading
— See what’s new with us at BLR —
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Angela Tang-Tan Wins Pushcart Prize for “Two Thoracotomies”
BLR is thrilled to announce that “Two Thoracotomies” by Angela Tang-Tan has won a Pushcart Prize. // continue reading
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BLR Spring Reading with Authors from Issue 50
Join us on May 28 to celebrate the launch of Issue 50. We’ll hear from the issue’s authors live as they share their stories, essays, and poems. // continue reading
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Announcing the BLR Book Club pick
We’re excited to announce our first pick for the BLR Book Club: Fire Exit, a novel by Morgan Talty. Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, and Harper’s… // continue reading
— Come join us, online, or in person —
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Celebration of Poetry and Healing
BLR is thrilled to be part of the 2026 poetry series at Bryant Park’s Reading Room. All are welcome — mark your calendar for September 1! // continue reading
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Creativity in Medicine: Navigating Uncertainty through Art and Literature
Explore how poetry, stories, and visual art can help us make sense of medicine’s complexities in this new online class. // continue reading
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BLR BookTalk with Author Morgan Talty
Watch a conversation diving into Morgan’s book Fire Exit, which was the inaugural selection for BLR’s Book Club. // continue reading
— Read interviews with BLR authors, editors, readers, and more —
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Interview: Laura E. Garrard
“I found capturing moments through poetry, rather than summarizing the entire cancer experience, to be therapeutic rather than draining.” // continue reading
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Interview: Lara Palmqvist
“The very idea that no story is final—be it the story of one’s own self, or the story of a nation—is ultimately something in which I find great hope.” // continue reading
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Interview: Sabah Parsa
“Humor is the easiest for me to write in any piece, fiction or nonfiction.” // continue reading
— A new set of great reads with each click —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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The Road to Carville
by Pat Tompkins. “It was a shame anyone had to go to Carville, a pity there was no cure, but Gar had been to war and knew how little fairness had to do with anything.” // continue reading
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Finding Honey
by Daniel Reiss. “To find honey, I must first find a bee. It’s not that hard to find a bee. I just wander the woods till I find a source of water. If I come to a creek or a… // continue reading
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Shaking the Dead Geranium
by Harriet Rzetelny. “By age sixteen, he’d won a full scholarship to Emory College. By eighteen, he was convinced that my mother was sucking the life fluids out of his brain and went after her with a bread knife.” // continue reading
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I Must Have Been That Man
by Adina Talve-Goodman. “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.” // continue reading
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Calling Card
by Mary Luce. “It was a chilly November afternoon in a southern town so small it never made it to a map. I was in the bedroom typing when I heard the noise and then my mother’s scream. She somehow… // continue reading
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Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War
by Diane Cameron. “In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living… // continue reading
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Glaucoma
by Charlene Fix. “What my eyes see reminds me of under-exposed / negatives from my bygone wet photography days, / days replete with eyes—the camera’s, the enlarger’s, mine—” // continue reading
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Letter to a Dead Mother
by Martha Silano. “Thinking of you as I pick up flecks of oats from the kitchen floor, / put them back in the container. You know, the five-second rule.” // continue reading
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Homage to My Radiated Hip
by Laura E. Garrard. “I am finally kind to my broken body / when she pops her hip, limps her leg. // I do not shout down my spine / but coo and coax like a loving mother…” // continue reading
As featured on PBS News Hour’s CANVAS Series
Watch PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown report on BLR’s 25th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri and past BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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.”
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).”





















