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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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Coulrophobia
by Jacob M. Appel. “My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord—he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even a college girl who “had law school written all over her”—but he probably bit off too much when he sublet to the mime.”
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Shaking the Dead Geranium
by Harriet Rzetelny. “By age sixteen, he’d won a full scholarship to Emory College. By eighteen, he was convinced that my mother was sucking the life fluids out of his brain and went after her with a bread knife.”
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The Sounds of Jilotzingo
by Mehr-Afarin Kohan. “Now her praying to the clouds sounded stupid because I was old enough to know that nothing and no one would ever be descending. And old enough to know, something had broken in my mother’s backbone forever.”
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Car Wash
by Arya Samuelson. “While I wait for him to pull the trigger, I drive to the grocery store. Pick up milk, chewing gum, sponges. Drop off the dry cleaning: the dress I splattered with a spaghetti stain at Shana and Calvin’s wedding last month. Ignore the stench of the rotting plant in the backseat and…
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Assisted Living
by Louise Aronson. “Mary’s not at dinner and no one knows why. Roy is limping but at least he’s up walking again after last month when he fell by the mailboxes and dislocated his new knee.”
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Spectrum
by Ian MacLean. “In sleeping, Joseph’s eyes moved under their lids, as if he still searched the ward and the land out the window for phenomena. Planets churned in arcs and stars collapsed somewhere in that blackness, and he searched for this too, his eye movements aligning with the movement of heavenly bodies.”
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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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Rivers
by Yalitza Ferreras. “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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His Own Time
by John Thompson. “I did a little time once. It wasn’t a long bit, but that doesn’t matter much. Time is time.”
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The Orchard
by Lauren Green. “When the bell finally rings, waste no time. Grab your Kipling from the cubby and head straight to the front of the carpool line.”
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Double Exposure
by Elisha Waldman. “Our hospital in Jerusalem feels haunted. Not, as one might think, by the ghosts of former patients, but rather by the living…”
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Claiming Missing Inheritance
by Jack Lancaster. “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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Dust, Light, Life
by Jacqueline Kolosov. “‘Why are there so many moths near the lamp, Mama?’ my five-year-old daughter Sophie asked, as we sat at our patio table a few weeks ago, the purple-rose of twilight of late April having by now given way to night.”
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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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Quarantine
by Matthew Davis. “I knew plague existed in Mongolia, but I had always thought it stayed in smaller towns further west.”
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Visual Anguish and Looking at Art
by Sheila Kohler. “I understand these were commercial jetliners, not ICBMs, that split the steel and glass of the World Trade Center. Someone, a person, had a long-standing vision, intentions, imagined the explosions and death that would follow.”
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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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Call/Waiting
by Alexa Rose Steinberg. “Throughout the evening, I hear explanations of why people can’t talk when I call…”
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Snapshots of Bellevue
by Dewitt Stetten, Jr. “On the east side of First Avenue, between 26th and 31st Streets in Manhattan, stood the ancient brick pile that was Bellevue Hospital.”
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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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On January 24th*
by Lauren K. Alleyne. “It’s been proven, they say— / the bills like a line of ants, / the glamour of the new year / grown dull like a tin ring…”
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Eye Examined
by Cortney Davis. “In the darkened room, vision dims. / The doctor leans close, looks eye to eye; / his light invades my pupil’s rim.”
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A Spring Without Us
by Talia Bloch. “The playground has been locked for months. / A swing coughs dryly in the shade.”
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Fast-Thinning Throng
by Rachel Hadas. “I’m angrily packing to fly to my dying brother. / My husband stands and watches. As a tree / might look at someone, he looks down at me.”
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In the Briars
by Colleen McKee. “As I walked to Lake Divine, I remembered I’d forgotten / To fill my pockets with rocks. I’m the type who forgets…”
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The James Webb Telescope Detects a Heartbeat
by Terry Tierney. “They say the pulses come from a distant galaxy, / an infant cluster in the first moment of birth.”
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OCD
by Sarah Giragosian. “To survive this exile, you will need / to hold court with the moon, store the memory / of its light in a mason jar for later.”
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Bellevue
by Julia Alvarez. “My mother used to say that she’d end up / at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.”
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White Peaches
by Winshen Liu. “For you, that week, we bought peaches like eggs: / twelve in a box, more than we’d had in years: // pink-skinned, white-fleshed…”
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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.”
This week's featured issue — part of our 25th anniversary lookback— focuses on literature rooted in multiculturalism. Enjoy three highlights from Issue 25, with more to explore in our weekly blog post that journeys through the BLR archive: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-25-highlights
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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/