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— Everything BLR —
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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 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 22 highlights
A short history of nursing, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year. // continue reading
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BLR 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 BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness. // continue reading
— See what’s new with us at BLR —
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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
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Announcing the 2027 BLR Literary Prizes Judges
Meet our 2027 BLR Literary Prize judges: Natalie Diaz, Daniel Mason, and Meghan O’Rourke. Submit poetry, fiction and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2026. // continue reading
— Come join us, online, or in person —
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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
Join us on June 11 for a live conversation as we dive into Morgan’s book Fire Exit, which was the inaugural selection for BLR’s new Book Club. // 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
— Read interviews with BLR authors, editors, readers, and more —
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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
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Interview: Jack Coulehan
“Clinical care provides the subject matter for many of my poems, and some of the themes I explore in them…have driven a process of self-discovery that I think has made me a better doctor.” // continue reading
— A new set of great reads with each click —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Atrophy
by Lauren Erin O’Brien. “Yarrow doesn’t say much aside from being strange but that’s less him and more his parents, if he even has those. He doesn’t seem like the type to come from a womb.” // continue reading
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What Is Buried Beneath
by Kati Eisenhuth. “…I stand in the OR at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, after another IED explosion. Two patients are laid out on surgical tables, each with a wound that gapes and gray skin tattooed by shrapnel.” // continue reading
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Coulrophobia
by Jacob M. Appel. “My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord—he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even a college girl who “had law school written all over her”—but he probably bit off too much when he… // continue reading
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Forty-One Months
by William McGrath. “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… // continue reading
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Okahandja Lessons
by Emily Rapp. “Welcome to Namibia! The battered wooden sign stood at the edge of a highway that was strewn with piles of twisted, smoking metal.” // continue reading
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The Color of Sound
by Judy Rowley. “Almost every night throughout my childhood I prayed that a miracle would occur, that I would be able to hear perfectly one day.” // continue reading
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The Initiation
by Alicia Ostriker. “Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard / before you know this business / and you just did / row one, plot one.” // continue reading
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Hemiplegia
by Ona Gritz. “Left, my bright half, gets all of it… / soft sharp prickly wet lined. / But press your head against my right shoulder, / I sense weight but no warmth.” // continue reading
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A Spring Without Us
by Talia Bloch. “The playground has been locked for months. / A swing coughs dryly in the shade.” // 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).”





















