25 years of creative writing on health, illness, and healing

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  • fiction
  • nonfiction
  • poetry
  • Translation Memory

    Translation Memory

    by Midge Raymond. “For days he came home to find her in the same spot, staring at an empty street. When she turned to him, her eyes looked like thin wet glass, as if the slightest sound could shatter them.” // continue reading

  • Last Stop

    Last Stop

    by Daniel Pope. “Outside the train station a man lies on the concrete brick walkway, his head resting in a pool of blood. His skull is buzzed and the blood leaks brightly out of a wound above his left temple.… // continue reading

  • Geese

    Geese

    by Grace Glass. “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… // continue reading

  • A Love Story All the Same

    A Love Story All the Same

    by Claire A. Berman. “…I understood that he’d been expressing his own insecurities, not mine. I entered new relationships full of trepidation. Symptoms and appearance were inextricably bound together in my mind, necessitating constant body vigilance to control them.” // continue reading

  • Motherhood Requiem

    Motherhood Requiem

    by Nadia Ghent. “One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen. She had gone to the hospital in the middle of the… // continue reading

  • I Must Have Been That Man

    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

  • Particle

    Particle

    by Jan Bottiglieri. “like light is / like my speckled skin: brim / and brink. verge…” // continue reading

  • Homage to My Radiated Hip

    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

  • Art 

    Art 

    by Eric Nelson. “October, a woman and a boy, a tumor / overtaking his brain, draw pictures / in the waiting room.” // 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