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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 38 highlights
World War II-inspired cover art, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Bellevue Literary Review: 2026 Fall Reading
Join us on October 22 to celebrate the launch of BLR’s special 25th anniversary issue; hear from the issue’s contributors live as they read from their work.
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Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 37 highlights
Exploring a good life, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 36 highlights
Literature as refuge, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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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 workshop.
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Coming soon! BLR’s 25th anniversary issue
Along with a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the anniversary issue of BLR includes special features including an art insert and roundtable about writing and healing.
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Interview: Tammy Greenwood
“Nature has a way of reminding us we don’t have to try so hard; sometimes just existing is magnificent.”
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Remembering September 11th
2026 marks 25 years since the devastating 9/11 attacks. Even after all these years, it still feels impossible to wrap one’s mind around the enormity and barbarity of that day…
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
-
Coming soon! BLR’s 25th anniversary issue
Along with a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the anniversary issue of BLR includes special features including an art insert and roundtable about writing and healing.
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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.
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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.
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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 Bazaar, Fire Exit is available on BLR’s Bookshop page, where a portion of every purchase goes to support community-building and…
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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.
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Writing the Body: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
Writing the Body, part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series, brings together four best-selling authors whose work confronts illness as it is lived in the body.
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BLR & Writers Read Present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery
Watch “Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery” hosted by City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review.
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2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
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Announcing the 2026 BLR Prizewinners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes.
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
BLR Spring Reading 2026
BLR‘s annual spring reading features stunning poems, stories, and essays, including the winners of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes. Hear from the issue’s contributors live as they read from their work. Hosted by BLR editors Saleem Hue Penny and Danielle Ofri
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Mapping the Mind
Mapping the Mind — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — is a dynamic conversation about writing the inner life. With Susannah Cahalan, Damon Tweedy, Sarah LaBrie, and Danielle Ofri
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Writing the Body
Writing the Body — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — brings together four best-selling authors whose work confronts illness as it is lived in the body. With Porochista Khakpour, Meghan O’Rourke, Rebekah Taussig, and Danielle Ofri
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BLR Fall Reading: Animalia
Watch writers and poets read their works from BLR‘s Issue 49, ‘Animalia,’ as part of BLR‘s live, online fall reading.
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BLR Book Salon with Anne Fadiman
Watch our exclusive BLR Book Salon with renowned writer Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
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BLR SPRING READING 2025: WINNING WORDS
Watch a celebration of BLR‘s 48th issue and the winners of the 2025 BLR literary prizes. Featuring exciting new works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus interviews with our prizewinners.
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BLR BookTalk with Venita Blackburn
Watch acclaimed writer Venita Blackburn and BLR editor Suzanne McConnell’s conversation on Venita’s award-winning debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California.
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BLR Writing Webinar: The Book Doctors Are In!
Watch medical writers Danielle Ofri, Damon Tweedy, Esther Choo, and Perri Klass discuss writing, careers, and ethical dilemmas as part of our workshop series.
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Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader
Watch Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader, celebrating the unique relationship between the writers who bring words to the page and the readers who receive them.
— Read interviews with BLR authors, editors, readers, and more. —
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Interview: Tammy Greenwood
“Nature has a way of reminding us we don’t have to try so hard; sometimes just existing is magnificent.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Interview: Sabah Parsa
“Humor is the easiest for me to write in any piece, fiction or nonfiction.”
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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.”
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Interview: Meredith Talusan
“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.”
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Interview: Manini Nayar
“I rarely know how a story ends until I get there. A story has its own life, and I am immersed in it and on the margins at the same time, both participant and recorder.”
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20th Anniversary Editorial Roundtable
In honor of BLR’s 20th anniversary, we’ve invited editors past and present to offer reflections on the BLR’s founding and its evolution over two decades of publishing.
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Interview: Julia Levine
“I have loved the natural world since I was a small child and it is my inability to see it accurately that pains me.”
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Interview: Nina Adel
“Almost all of my work takes place in the realm of the hybrid… I myself am just a regular person and artist who finds rules very difficult to adhere to.”
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Winston Speaks
by Jill Caputo. “Winston sold candy at the bus station on Wednesdays because that was the only day Georgia could give him a ride there. He kept the goods in the pack on the back of his chair: Snickers, Milky Ways, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, both peanut and plain…”
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Leviathan
by Jennifer Lee. “At what point, I wonder, does a person say enough is enough? I can’t go through with this; I didn’t pick the ending I’ve been given. I would dearly love to keep the next few years of my life.”
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Battenkill
People need the company of other people. It’s how people are made. They can’t help it. This need can be degrading to a person’s soul, if souls are real.
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The Wedding Photographer’s Assistant
by Ilana Stanger. “’Dina,’ she said, ‘you’re the least romantic person I know. For you to be a wedding photographer is too hilarious to pass up.’”
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Admonition
by Benjamin Kessler. “They’ve formed a barricade…Mountain goats stand shoulder to shoulder across the narrow two-lane. They appear unbothered by the idling of my car’s engine, content to simply stand and chew dry grass sprouted between asphalt cracks.”
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Examining Rooms
by Midge Raymond. “These future doctors need to make a personal connection, to take the time to discuss next steps, to listen . . . Expressing the symptoms of pain is one thing—judging people on their performances is another.”
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Rocket
by Jason Baum. “He asks if he can put the radio to a country station…the guy is going into space for a year so I let him. Who knows what kind of reception he’ll be able to get up there.”
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White Space
by Amanda McComick. “She had an endless appetite for information, and even though it was just a million different angles on the same collapsing towers, she filed away the details, she hungered for information.”
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The Beautiful Ones
by Don Zancanella. “I grew up in a working-class suburb of Denver with a mother who was a functioning alcoholic and a father who sold office supplies and was frequently on the road. I dropped out of school at sixteen and started supporting myself…”
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Convergence
by Kathryn Kulpa. “It’s going to happen today. He can feel it waiting to happen, because he’s wanted to know for so long. There are people who live to satisfy curiosity, and Derrick is one of them.”
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Going South
by Natalie Pearson. “I make amends with small gifts—a loaf of crusty bread, a Louie Prima CD, lilacs in a mason jar. This little drive to nowhere would be just such a gift.”
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Remembering Appleman
by Scott Temple. “’If I can’t help your mother,’ Appleman said to me, ‘then I’ll help you build some armor against her rages.’”
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Cancer, So Far
by Elizabeth Crowell. “Last summer, the moths clung to the shingles of our house. They fluttered right past us, mottled wings snapping, through our open door.”
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Two Thoracotomies
by Angela Tang-Tan. “The first time I witness a thorax opened, it is on a twenty-five-gram mouse. Heavier than most because she is gravid. The second time, it’s on a thirty-year-old man.”
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Drawing Blood
by Laura Johnsrude. “I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it.”
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Given
by Nancy Devine. “This must be the first harvest from our acreage: our young vineyard singing, the plastic, ribbed grow tubes that make little greenhouses for each of the young grape plants catching wind and, like a throat and its vocal chords, producing a note.”
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Blood/Shed
by Alanna Weissman. “You know what they say—never trust anything that can bleed for a week without dying.”
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Carrying History
Sahar Delijani. “I am a child of the Iranian revolution. In 1983, my mother gave birth to me in Evin Prison, one of Iran’s most notorious jails.”
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How Air Moves
by Leslie Roberts. “Underneath is a body cast, my new ectoskeleton, my nautilus, crawled into, where I live now.”
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Your Cane
by Sabah Parsa. “I still remember the sound of the rubber thumping rhythmically against the carpet as you walked, slow and steady. Whenever I heard it, I knew it was you.”
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Price Tag
by Alma Gaxiola. “If every life’s a story / Then their’s will always be worth more / Mine was drowned out by the water / Running like fathers for the door…”
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by Olivia Mae Longoria. “First, my mother. / Shortly after, my father. / A few of their friends, whom I call aunt or uncle. / A doctor with a chart and the result of a genetic test.”
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Luggage
by Ted Kooser. “I’ve given away the black Samsonite suitcase / that for thirty-five years enfolded my suits / like a wallet…”
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Bones
by Anne Pierson Wiese. “Big leg bones / of cows sawed / into round sections / that when broiled / erupt thick burps of marrow…”
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Baptism
by Michele Bombardier. “I pull up a chair, lower the bedrails. / He bats at my hand. When he finds it, he quiets, / his hand a vice on mine.”
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Cleaver
by Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador. “I do not think about flesh anymore, but if I did, / I would tell you about its adoration / for cruelty.”
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The James Webb Telescope Detects a Heartbeat
by Terry Tierney. “They say the pulses come from a distant galaxy, / an infant cluster in the first moment of birth.”
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Images
by Sofia M. Starnes. “If I forget you, / will you disappear? / The arc of Rilke’s question seemed to spawn/ out of a dustbin, / remnant of a / sheer belief that minds are gods.”
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The Oncologist
by Carole Stone. “Do you have an appetite? / No. / Are you anxious? Yes. / Irritable? Yes. / I hand in the questionnaire.”
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Edges
by Missy-Marie Montgomery. “The deer stepped out in front of my car / so politely, as if to say is this a good time? / And it happened that it was, / perfectly timed between cars and patches of ice. / I braked. She stepped gracefully across…”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—revisits past BLR Prizewinners, with more to explore in our weekly blog post. Plus, the colorful WWII-inspired cover has a story of its own. 🎨 https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-38-highlights
4It's an exciting time to be part of the BLR community, with new releases & milestones from our authors. 🎉 A few highlights are shown here, plus there’s even more in our recent roundup: https://tinyurl.com/blrauthornews
4This week's ft. issue—part of our 25th anniv lookback—is entitled "A Good Life" & showcases poetry & prose that looks deeply at the joys & complications of our individual worlds. Read three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-37-highlights
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