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— Everything BLR. —
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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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What We’re Reading Now
Looking for your next literary escape? Here are some recommended reads from our editorial team.
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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 BookTalk with Author Morgan Talty
Join us on June 11 for a live conversation as we dive into Morgan’s book Fire Exit, which was the inaugural selection for BLR’s new Book Club.
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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 Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 7
In this final week of the BLR Book Club’s review of FIRE EXIT, the question of whether Charles will have a relationship with Elizabeth in the future persists.
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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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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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.
-
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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
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.
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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 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.
— 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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The Third Story
by Rebecca Wurtz. “Paul once thought that the talent and ambition that had propelled him into graduate school as the first Negro PhD in pharmacology would keep propelling him, perhaps into a chairmanship at a prestigious Negro university. But life and history took over…”
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Charmed
by Leissa Shahrak. “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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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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Born on Sunday
by Mark Rigney. “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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Crosscurrents
by Meredith Talusan. “Whenever you don’t want to be who you are, you call yourself Margaret Jefferson. And that’s who you are now, or who you are when you’re not yourself, walking into the conference room of an accounting firm in a random midtown Manhattan building for an open writers’ meetup in the fall of…
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Evacuation Instructions
by Elliott Hold. “With the fat stripped away, she is her essential self. They don’t tell you how beautiful people can be when they’re dying.”
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String Theory
by Venita Blackburn. “Something happens to people that rescue other people, a covenant of sorts… The promise is the same: when I see you, I will keep you safe. I looked at Mariko, the quasar of freckles between her eyes, and that promise was made.”
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Afternoon Heat
by Vishwas R. Gaitonde. “Summer sapped the energy out of us all, the patients in the waiting room under a whirring fan and I in my consulting room.”
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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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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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Loaded Gun
by Erin Van Rheenen. “The room with the gun is where my father-in-law, Phil, watches the news at full hectoring volume…The news he favors taps into his fear of the big bad world and anyone who isn’t him.”
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Sisters
by Sheila Kohler. “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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No One Thing
by Laura LeMoon. “The things I’ve had to do to survive were part of the price I paid to be seen…Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.”
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Anticipatory Grief
by Misty Kiwak Jacobs. “After Father Marcel died, he came to me in a dream and said, “I liked you very much.” Not the Great Commandment that he kept, his job description. Gloriously less…Those words his imprimatur on my grief.”
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Of Mothers and Monkeys
by Caitlin Kuehn. “My medical knowledge is limited to what I have learned here at the lab. All of it applicable only to non-human mammals.”
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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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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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Snapshots of Bellevue
by Sandra Opdycke. “When sick New Yorkers failed to find a place in private institutions like New York Hospital, they turned to public hospitals like Bellevue.”
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Dispatch From Bewilderness
by Judith Hannah Weiss. “Probes puncture my scalp, surveying my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, you name it; there’s a probe for the lobe.”
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A Doctor in the Court of the King of Nepal
by Itzhak Kronzon. “I labored to decipher the pidgin English until I at last understood that the King of Nepal wanted me, Dr. Itzhak Kronzon of the Bronx Municipal Hospital, to come to his royal court.”
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The Speed of Mice
by Hal Sirowitz. “When the Parkinson’s medication / wears down, I turn into Cinderella. / My means of transportation / slows down to the speed of / a pumpkin pulled by mice.”
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Speech Derapy
by Stephanie Choy. “Dey discovered it in dird grade / whenever we practiced counting / money, candy, or people / I kept saying dirty, dirty…”
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Word
by David Woo. “The high sweep of waves, like the bulging arc / of a grand piano, and the silence of deer in a field of / lupine and trefoil, and the underthrum…”
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To See How the Snow Blanketed the Trees
by Cory Brown. “To see how the snow blanketed the trees / along Taughannock Creek Road, I turned off / Route 96 this morning.”
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A THREAD OF SUNLIGHT ON EURYDICE’S HEM
by Eric Pankey. “Call it an exercise in restraint / The angle of ascent is sharp / Like the sloped ceiling…”
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Speech
by Laurie Klein. “Lock that tongue to the roof / of your mouth, the therapist says, / eyeing the trach / at the base of her throat.”
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Uremia
by Margaret Kogan. “The smell is like nothing else. / Sickeningly sweet and kind of smoky, / like something burning and rotting at the same time, / it filled my father’s hospital room / and stuck to our clothes and nostrils / long after he died.”
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The Bottom Drawer
by Amanda Auchter. “Tucked beneath my mother’s shirts / and camisoles, a paper bag / of prayer cards, I find…”
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To the Friend Who Can’t Tell a Turtle from a Lump of Pond Gunk
by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. “I don’t know what will / happen, but let’s not rush home to the / leaking faucet just yet, the ants / hauling cat food behind the walls.”
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Autumn Crickets
As late sun fades/ through the haze/ of their sound
Polish it up, send it out! Opportunities from...
@iselemagazine
@narrativemag
@blreview - specifically for work (all genres) on the themes of health, illness, and healing (note the amazing judges!)
@fourwaybooks
@storybottleco
This week's featured issue — part of our 25th anniversary lookback— showcases winners of our annual contest and much more. The BLR Prizes for this issue were selected by judges Francine Prose, Cornelius Eady, and Susan Orlean.
https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-22-highlights