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— Everything BLR. —
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2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
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Weekly Read: “Forty-One Months” by Will McGrath
This week’s read is “Forty-One Months” by Will McGrath, which won BLR’s Prize for Nonfiction in 2014.
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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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Remembering Hal Sirowitz
Hal Sirowitz somehow managed to unearth the irony and wit embedded in even the weightiest of topics.
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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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Weekly Read: “Bus” by Joan Leegant
This week’s read is “Bus” by Joan Leegant, which was awarded honorable mention in BLR’s Goldenberg Prize for Fiction in 2013.
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Weekly Read: “Dementia Unit for John Glenn” by Amy Rothschild
This week’s read is “Dementia Unit for John Glenn” by Amy Rothschild, from BLR Issue 46.
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Weekly Read: “Coulrophobia” by Jacob M. Appel
This week’s read is “Coulrophobia” by Jacob M. Appel, from BLR Issue 9.
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Weekly Read: “If You Scared, Say You Scared” by Sheree L. Greer
This week’s read is “If You Scared, Say You Scared” by Sheree L. Greer, from BLR Issue 45.
No more posts
— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
-
Announcing the 2026 BLR Prizewinners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes.
-
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.
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Sick! True Short Stories About Illness, Recovery, and More
BLR is excited to collaborate with Writers Read on an upcoming storytelling event in which writers get to read their tales live on stage.
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Crafting a Story of Illness: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
Watch Crafting a Story of Illness, which brought together four best-selling authors whose work spans the worlds of literature and healthcare for a rich conversation on writing about the body, illness, and healing.
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Announcing the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes Judges
Meet our 2026 BLR Literary Prize judges! Submit your best poetry, fiction and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2025.
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2024 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
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2025 BLR Prize Winners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2025 BLR Literary Prizes.
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BLR Spring 2024 Reading: Winning Words
Meet the writers and editors behind BLR’s Issue 46, our latest contest issue featuring the winners of the 2024 BLR Prizes. Featuring readings by Shastri Akella, Misty Kiwak Jacobs, and Amy Rothschild With interviews by BLR editors Doris W. Cheng, Danielle Ofri, and Saleem Hue Penny Plus additional poetry by William Klein, Siobhan McKenna, and Carolene Kurien Online, Thursday, May 23 at…
— 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. —
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fiction
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nonfiction
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poetry
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My Uncle Deserves Chekhov
“Every family has one,” my sister Joyce liked to say. “One crazy uncle or aunt they can’t hide or forget.”
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If Brains Was Gas
I turned thirteen that week. I assumed that it came with some new liberties, but no one had specifically said so, and I was too uncertain to ask. Still, the night after my birthday, Elmo and me made plans to go out.
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The Facts
Occasional lapses in taste or discretion within this narrative are entirely intentional. So, if it seems inappropriate to interrupt a tragic drowning with observations about the nesting habits of local birds, then consider this…
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The Wedding Photographer’s Assistant
“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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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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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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The Awful Thing
I am finding the experience terrifyingly similar to what I imagine it would be like to witness my mother drown. I stand on the shore and throw ropes to her, but she has no idea what to do with them. I try to swim to her, but she only moves farther away.
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Mud
I saw the man before he died, under the front tire of my father’s truck. He was pinned and the truck stalled and then settled in the mud and three grown men were not enough to push the truck forward or backward to stop the man’s pain. I was not a grown man. I was…
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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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Rivers
Aunt #1’s plastic toilet lid shifts under Manolo’s weight as he balances his left ankle on his right knee, careful so his leg doesn’t slide off his sweatpants.
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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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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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Given
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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Canine Cardiology
Houdi pawed at the student’s thighs and, despite his heart condition, displayed one of his inopportune erections, which the vet student chose not to acknowledge.
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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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A Doctor in the Court of the King of Nepal
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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Of Mothers and Monkeys
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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If You Scared, Say You Scared
by Sheree L. Greer. “Every time I think I learn something about myself, about my body and how to best treat it or love it, my body tells me that control is a lie.”
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Subway Stories
My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.
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Breaking Point
Our heads are filled with the native rhythm of an aerobic beat and hot anticipation.
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Chronic Pain as Paperweight Hand-Blown at the Glass Factory
by Lena Crown. “Inside the clear glass orb whirl two ribbons / of orange and blue, a goldfish in a bowl.”
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“Never Send…”
Having left work early this spring / afternoon, I feel no rush / to be anywhere but here and now, / even waiting at this reluctant light,
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EVOCATION (STREETS)
I am surrounded by streets/ half dark, half lit, by high rises/ sheathed in metal and glass,
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Hemiplegia
Left, my bright half, gets all of it…/ soft sharp prickly wet lined./ But press your head against my right shoulder,/ I sense weight but no warmth.
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Because You Are Dead You Think You Can Have Anything You Want
You come back, / bent over my things / like a collector, hunched, / touching, wanting to lay claim / to everything.
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Catching Pregnancy
by Lisa Mullenneaux. “Sometimes she read a book, / listening to music. It was as if / if you got too close you might / catch pregnancy.”
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Six Weeks into Chemotherapy
To be unseen, unprayed for, to be unhugged / in the grocery store and left alone // to select a melon.
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Chronic Care: “Broken Leg” by Keith Carter, Photograph (Toned Gelatin Silver Print 1998)
The girl in black dress and tights stands behind the fawn,/ hands clasped, their white blur forming almost/ a heart.
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Ear Examined
A trickster, the ear. Making us believe/ what eyes deny or hearts might doubt,
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“Silence = Death”
His worn-out T-shirt, black as mourning, black / as countless deaths, surprises me
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 @PushcartPrize nominees.🎉 Congrats and best of luck to these six nominees, and thank you to all BLR contributors for sharing your poems, essays, and stories in our pages!
Fiction:
Chinaecherem Obor, "Bushmeat"
Daniel Reiss, "Finding Honey"
BLR's Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week's read is "Forty-One Months" by Will McGrath, which won BLR's Prize for Nonfiction in 2014. 📖
Read the fully essay: https://blreview.org/nonfiction/forty-one-months/