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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 5 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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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
City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery live on Sunday, February 22nd, at 1:00 PM.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 4 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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Mapping the Mind: 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 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 2 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 1 highlights
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
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A Look Back: Highlights from 2025
As we get ready to step into 2026 – and launch BLR’s 25th anniversary! – let’s take a look back at what made 2025 such a special year.
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Remembering Dr. Jerome Lowenstein
A tribute to Jerome Lowenstein, MD, BLR’s founding nonfiction editor, who passed away on December 8, 2025.
No more posts
— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 5 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.
-
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.
-
BLR & Writers Read Present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery
City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery live on Sunday, February 22nd, at 1:00 PM.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 4 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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 2 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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ issue 1 highlights
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
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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.
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Be part of the “Narrative Arc”: Tell us about your favorite BLR poem, story, or essay
One of the ways we’ll be celebrating BLR’s 25th anniversary is with a new Narrative Arc event… which means another opportunity to share your voice with our community!
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Fall Reading: Animalia LIVE!
Watch the launch celebration of BLR’s special issue, “Animalia,” featuring writing that explores how health and healing both transcend and interconnect species, and what this can teach us about being human.
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
BLR FALL READING 2025 | ANIMALIA: LIVE!
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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BLR’s Annual ‘Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader’
Watch BLR‘s annual 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. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Charmed
The handle of Hamid’s saber curved above his cummerbund. Arun did not like the way Hamid’s betel-stained teeth smiled out from between his oiled, drooping mustache.
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Girls, at Play
This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue.
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SUTHY Syndrome
I shit you not. Right in front of the elevator that spits you into our hospice, there is—get ready for this—a harpist. I mean, isn’t that like a teensy bit premature?
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Halfway to the Afterlife
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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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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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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Vultur Gryphus
by Daniel Seifert. “Luis unscrews a small bottle of puro and daubs Tio’s smiling mouth. In the still air, the pure alcohol makes Luis’s eyes water. Further down, he hears the deep-throated cough of a detonation. He heads toward it.”
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We Are Only Human
My mother believed it was important for a child to witness healthy communication about difficult topics. My father allowed this as long as I remained quiet and didn’t interfere.
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The Little Things
The rule of conduct for freshmen confronted by a homeroom teacher rarely varies. Shaniece chooses the most common move…
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Step-Down
I don’t mind the night shift. I’m still new here, granted, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I mind it.
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Okahandja Lessons
Welcome to Namibia! The battered wooden sign stood at the edge of a highway that was strewn with piles of twisted, smoking metal.
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Frontline
by D. Liebhart. “When she was in her armchair, I brought her breakfast. She took a single bite then put down her spoon. “This is stupid,” she said. “This is only going to make it last longer.””
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You Imagine Death
by Justine Payton. “Just five months ago, you hiked to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, whitewater rafted down the Nile, climbed volcanoes in Rwanda. Now, from the neck down, your body is unresponsive.”
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The Only Fat Man in Lascahobas
Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.
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71 Grams
by Nicki Porter. “At home, you unload each item with a quiet smile and feel a pinching like a tiny crab below your belly. You imagine a poppy seed nestling in, burrowing, seeking shelter within you, preparing to stay.”
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All Our Relations
What if our evolution as humans was measured by how graciously and profoundly we related to the living world around us?
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Tethered to the Body
There is only illness, and there is no way to make that sexy. After several years as a medical device wearer, I know.
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Presence of Another
The nurses in the ICU had said I was going to rehabilitation, but since I’ve only heard rehab synonymous with addicts, I have no idea what to expect. The huge collar around my neck prevents me from seeing much beyond the EMT, so I’ve got nowhere else to focus my fear. I try again.
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Sisters
For a moment my sister seemed to hesitate, standing in the ghostly light of the moon, as though she were considering going back.
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By the Neck
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 it loose and…
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The Cradles of St. Kilda
From 1850 to 1890 forty-one of fifty-six infants born on St. Kilda in the Hebrides died of tetanus caused by the custom of anointing the umbilical stump with oil stored in the dried stomach of a goose.
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Ambulance
“This restaurant has a fine ambulance.”/ What my friend, of course, must have/ meant was that this restoration/ had a fine ambience,
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Carousel
The Pacific Ocean, to a child of three, sounds like a push-broom in his mother’s kitchen. Life took us elsewhere: like other boys, I learned
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Migrations
San Nicolas fluctuated between mentor, master. / The more I travelled the stairs, he levitated. The more / I slid my finger along his goldstone frame, he’d say, /‘Ciónnn.
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Describe a morning you woke without fear.
It is four in the darkness and you cannot breathe. / You cannot will your chest to expand, and suddenly, / this is all right.
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Before Another CT Scan
Think your lungs a forest cleared./ Your breath winged/ as if it had a better place to go
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The Rice-Eating Ceremony
Nine months into my life, I am asked to eat on command / These tiny bursts of cylindrical snow that will reappear / Again and again
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O To Be a Semiautomatic Weapon
Late June fields greening under a mottled sky. An oriole slashes orange against a shingled Cape Cod.
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Papa (Bi-Polar) Bear
You didn’t come to bed until morning/ You opened and closed doors all night/ while I slept in the ambient soot
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Synaptic Space
What happens in that leap/ that in-between, that cleft?
Throughout our anniversary year 🎉, we're inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with stories, poems, photos, and more. This week features Issue 5 highlights from from authors Allison Amend, Toni Mirosevich, and Meg Kearney. 📖 Learn more: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-05
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Don't miss this special @WritersRead and @BLReview event @CityWineryNYC on 2/22!
https://tinyurl.com/ycxv3xa4
#BodyLanguageStories #CityWineryNYC #WritersRead #BellevueLiteraryReview #SundayInNYC #LiveStorytelling #CreativeNonfiction #LiteraryEvents #TrueStories