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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 25 highlights
Literature and the multicultural perspective, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Editor Danielle Ofri on “Why Medicine Needs Literary Magazines”
“Maybe a literary journal is not so much pages bound onto a spine, but rather a community of people—writers, readers, listeners, thinkers—who find solace in the comforts and confrontations of the written word.”
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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 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 24 highlights
At the eye of the storm, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Celebration of Poetry and Healing
BLR is thrilled to be part of the 2026 poetry series at Bryant Park’s Reading Room. All are welcome — mark your calendar for September 1!
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 23 highlights
Meditations on family and fragility, 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 class.
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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.
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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.
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 25 highlights
Literature and the multicultural perspective, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 24 highlights
At the eye of the storm, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 23 highlights
Meditations on family and fragility, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
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.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 21 highlights
A look back to our 10th anniversary, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 19 highlights
Early writing from two best-selling authors in the BLR community, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 18 highlights
The stories that stay with us, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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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.
— 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: 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.
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Interview: Yalitza Ferreras
English has now become my primary language, although I experience it as a syllabic language, which I attribute to my brain being wired for Spanish.
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
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fiction
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nonfiction
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poetry
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In Lieu of a Better Plan
by Elizabeth Downs. “One otherwise pleasant evening at the asylum, I—a known murderess and recently declared Vice President of Ward G—escape through a partially opened, third-story window.”
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Parricide
by Steve Fayer. “My father killed his mother, confessed it to me in his last year as the black dog of depression chased him toward his own grave.”
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A Big Empty
by Rhonda Browning White. “We hadn’t talked since we left our West Virginia homeplace over two hours ago, both of us teary-eyed…”
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The Gift of the Spanish Lady
by Marcia Calhoun Forecki. “The last words Mrs. Sommers said to her husband were: ‘And don’t let that girl have the run of the house.’”
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The Cult of Me
by Allison Amend. “I’m not a suspicious person; I think that the quickest way between two points is a straight line and that the simplest explanation is the truest. I don’t care if our atmosphere is being eaten away by toxic gas.”
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Halfway to the Afterlife
by Parker Desautell. “I had come into the hospital as I came into the world—twitching, foaming, groaning. I was almost brain-dead, they said, yet here I was, good as reborn.”
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What They Will Say
by Fabienne Josaphat. “Marielle’s sisters and cousins were all born with judgment in their mouths, always throwing stones at women who stepped out of line or into the fire.”
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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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Eruv
by David Milofsky. “Dotty Adams remarked that she hadn’t known there were any Jews in the neighborhood. Some people wondered if the men in long black coats and broad-brimmed hats were Goths, like those boys at Columbine.”
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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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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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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 working somewhere…”
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Vital Signs
by Rachel Mann. “One thing you will feel, as fiercely as the contractions squeezing you now like a juicer, is that it will always be a different kind of loss for him.”
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Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War
by Diane Cameron. “In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living room, both perforated with bullets.”
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Dark Valley
by Zoë Sprankle. “I’m too young now to know how soon imaginary play will decay and mature into rumors and cliques and senior boys with beards who look at me like I’m simultaneously a toddler and a toy.”
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The Next Bullet
by Jeremy Griffin. “Despite my respect for my students, I was afraid of them. Afraid of the way they watched me as I delivered a lecture, afraid of whispers, silences.”
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By the Neck
by Laura Johnsrude. “Suddenly, the baby’s head was in my hands and I saw the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck—the neck, oh my, with all those critical bits of anatomy. I held that big slippery baby head in my left hand and slid a couple of fingers under the purple rope and lifted…
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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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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.”
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A Staircase in the Fog
by Robin Fast. “Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast is memory. It was wintertime thirty-five years ago when I learned that family afflictions, like weather, come at you from beyond.”
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Looking Back
by Floyd Skloot. “summer lose its grip. Nothing more / than a waning of the scents that dwelt / all season near the hilltop…”
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School Shooting
by Adam Scheffler. “After today’s rain / all that’s left / of the planets / green and pink / they’d chalked / on the sidewalk…”
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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…”
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Clínica Hispana
by Hillary Kobernick. “I am reading Spanish posters / and wondering about stomach aches— / mine, mostly.”
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The Shed
by Elana Bell. “Each time something went missing— / the photo album of my first / year, postcard from a forgotten friend…”
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Valentine
by Chelsea Krieg. “For minutes,/ I watch his heart: ventricles contracting, / blood pumping – my other silent pulsing center.”
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One Day
by Kwame Sound Daniels. “One day, I will love you like a meal. / I will love you like holding a spoon to your mouth.”
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Escape
by Susan Donnelly. “Everything she did that day / was the hardest thing / she’d done, but it felt easy.”
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Ahihi Bay
by Floyd Skloot. “So far this morning has been cool and gray but as she walks backward into the sea, adjusting her snorkel and mask, sunlight appears over Haleakala’s cone…”
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Glaucoma
by Charlene Fix. “What my eyes see reminds me of under-exposed / negatives from my bygone wet photography days, / days replete with eyes—the camera’s, the enlarger’s, mine—”
Writers!⌛️Submit by end of day *tomorrow, July 1* for general submissions and the 2027 BLR Prizes. We can't wait to read your work!
#poetry #fiction #nonfiction #writing
Get those final edits done! 📢 Both general & contest submissions will be closing July 1. Submit your poetry, fiction, nonfiction on health, illness, & healing.
This year's contest judges are the remarkable Natalie Diaz, Daniel Mason, & Meghan O'Rourke.
https://blreview.org/submit/
🎉 BLR is thrilled to announce that “Two Thoracotomies” by Angela Tang-Tan has won a @PushcartPrize! Angela’s essay—from BLR Issue 49, our "Animalia" issue—parallels her experience in a research lab with a devastating overnight shift in the emergency room. https://blreview.org/news/recent-news/angela-tang-tan-wins-pushcart-prize-for-two-thoracotomies/
"Running a literary magazine was not in my academic game plan...." In a new article from @TheLancet, our editor @danielleofri shares how a kernel of an idea about the importance of patient stories turned into a literary publication 25 years ago 📖🩺
https://danielleofri.com/why-medicine-needs-literary-magazines/
Life has its storms—in some cases, literally. 💦 This week's featured issue of BLR was published in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and includes a series of recollections from frontline medical residents, plus a mix of poetry, fiction, & nonfiction. https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-24-highlights
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