A journal of humanity and human experience
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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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Fiction allows me to further portray realities from perspectives outside the majority, not just at the level of my lived experience but in terms of a broad range of possible trans, BIPOC, immigrant, and disabled experiences.
The book is dazzling and groundbreaking. The author’s bright, spare prose engages us intensely with her characters and their relationships.
On the island / where we landed, radiation /
lit my father up, illuminated / hidden damage…
I’m grateful that my impulse to write was fed by nursing, by that intense, important arena that offers every emotion and every human situation on earth.
For minutes,/
I watch his heart: ventricles contracting,/
blood pumping – my other silent pulsing center
Even your children, Mom and daee, tried lecturing you, but I knew you didn’t regret it. The sour taste you adored was still in your mouth.
Recovery. It is the word that followed me while reading White Magic by Elissa Washuta. It whispered at me between sentences, chasing me from chapter to chapter.
I labored to decipher the pidgin English until I at last understood that the King of Nepal wanted me, Dr. Itzhak Kronzon of the Bronx Municipal Hospital, to come to his royal court.
there will be/
no burial burn/
the body cancer/
cratered
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).”