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— Everything BLR. —
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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 past BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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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 Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 5
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, history, illness, and identity weave their way through the story.
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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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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 17 highlights
The power of intimate storytelling, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 4
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, Charles is visited by his childhood friend Gizos.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 16 highlights
Stories, poems, and essays on the immense emotional landscape of illness, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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5 Short Poems That Pack a Punch
One of the great things about poetry is how open it is—epic poems can run thousands of lines while others need just a handful of words to make an impact. Short poems pack a lot…
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BLR Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 3
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, we get an up-close look at what it’s like to care for a loved one…
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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.
-
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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 17 highlights
The power of intimate storytelling, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 16 highlights
Stories, poems, and essays on the immense emotional landscape of illness, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 15 highlights
Thought-provoking reads on the vast range of abilities and disabilities, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 14 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 13 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 12 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 11 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
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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…
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
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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Ghosts of Doubt
He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty- something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters…
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Sloth, That Wicked Siren
Why he stopped showering, no one could say for sure, though everyone had their guesses.
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Admonition
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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Hallandale Beach, 1987
It is not a miracle of faith, but a miracle of perseverance that delivers them both to high ground, the boy wincing under her bruising grip, protesting, I was joking, I could stand all the time, and the Bubbe, her dress soaked, her mound of blond hair slumped to one side.
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Mushroom Death Suit
by Tyriek White. “She shrunk away; a cold, spring evening. Like the harsh, white light to a newborn. Too many knives and machines and opening and closing. Stitching and restitching. Blood in and blood out.”
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Looking at Aquaman
Something nobody warns you about, when you get very sick, is that you have to be polite. You have to be Emily f-ing Post every minute of the day,
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Atrophy
Yarrow doesn’t say much aside from being strange but that’s less him and more his parents, if he even has those. He doesn’t seem like the type to come from a womb.
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Avtomat Kalashnikova
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out.
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Born on Sunday
All of the Peace Corps medics are male and white. The most retiring of these, Claude Renner, is the one unlucky enough to be nearest the entrance when the soldier bursts inside, carrying his unconscious son in his arms.
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Snow Over Hartford
by Dan Pope. “Mulvaney passed him the water cup, directed the straw toward his lips. From the hallway he heard the yelp of a police radio—the Hartford cops, pacing the floor, waiting on him, drinking hospital coffee.”
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Motherhood Requiem
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 night with my stepfather—a psychiatrist, but not hers—and after I came home from school that day, nothing was…
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Conduit
This is a temple for them, I thought. This is where the gods will be merciful or not. And I speak for the gods.
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Cancer, So Far
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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Carrying History
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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Our Psychedelic Minibreak
I am Googling the best places to get magic mushrooms. It’s important to stress here that I am the squarest person who has ever lived.
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Claiming Missing Inheritance
At the Whitney Museum, David Wojnarowicz’s portrait of his friend Peter Hujar claims its own wall. Ten feet back, I twist from parallel to perpendicular, unexpectedly lingering instead of walking by.
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Solitude
I am back with the ‘who’ of me, the self I left behind through the seasons of my years. The ultimate prize is this reconciliation with the original, unvarnished self.
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Snapshots of Bellevue
The “General Slocum,” was the biggest and fastest harbor day-liner. That day, about 2,000 passengers, embarked for an annual Sunday School excursion.
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Our Eyes Were Watching Marcia
Television had always been a perfect distraction from our family’s drama and trauma, soothing us more than our Baptist faith.
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Remembering Appleman
“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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Relic
Quietly, they concede, leaving pennies at your feet.
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Glaucoma
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—
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Arlo
Late June fields greening under a mottled sky. An oriole slashes orange against a shingled Cape Cod.
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We Are Afraid
We are afraid/ of junior high school students and the nauseating things / they say among their own kind.
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Chaas Curry
by E. Hume Covey. “Two months into her illness, Pat / lay in pain, nearly immobile, / nourished by pills and liquids, / no appetite even for favorite foods—”
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Midnight in the Alzheimer’s Suite
Lost in the midnight stillness, my mother/ rises to dress and begin another/ chilly day. She crosses the moonlit floor.
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Ode to Impotence
Thank goodness every so often a monument closes down for renovation…
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How Humans Came to Loneliness
They woke to the primal sway / of grass, cold fire. Here was // a light rain falling from the eyelid / of the sky.
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The Mountain and the Teaspoon
She wondered what would happen / to her actual face. Would it fade away? Or would it / stay put, like a person you can never get rid of
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A Zoom Call, Before Treatment
He has started praying – / my mother says, clenching in her hands / a blurry set of pixels.
This week, we revisit an early contest issue. 📖 Three pieces from Issue 18 are highlighted here, as part of our 25th anniversary lookback. Fun fact: poet Amanda Auchter is the only prizewinner to be awarded 1st place & hon. mention in the same year! https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-18-highlights
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The Bellevue Literary Review is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The journal has also grown into a larger literary arts organization with events, writing workshops and more.
Cool to see @BLReview on PBS Newshour. A great journal I encourage those in healthcare to check out. Honored to have been published there back in 2024. Congrats on the anniversary!
BLR Issue 50 is here! And to celebrate it, we're welcoming authors from the issue for a live reading. 📖
Join us online on Thursday, May 28, for an evening of new poems, stories, and essays, with a healthy dose of community and connection.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2186775