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 and will be published in their next anthology! Angela’s essay — from BLR Issue 49, our theme issue on “Animalia” — parallels her experience in a research lab with a devastating overnight shift in the emergency room.

Dr. Angela Tang-Tan is a neurosurgery resident physician at Oregon Health and Science University. She studied neurobiology and psychology at UC Berkeley and received her MD from the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

She served as an ambulance EMT during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tang-Tan’s short stories, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the Examined Life Journal. Her piece “Top Surgery” was included in Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine and nominated for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Essays 2025.

The Pushcart Prize, started in 1976, is an esteemed annual anthology of stories, poems, essays and memoirs selected from hundreds of small magazines and presses throughout the world. Several outstanding pieces published in BLR have won Pushcart Prizes over the years. Here are just a few to add to your reading list!

“Girls, At Play” by Celeste Ng

“Death Defiant Bomba, or What to Wear When Your Boo Gets Cancer” by Lilliam Rivera

“Do I Look Sick To You?” by C.J. Hribal