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— Everything 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.
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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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BLR Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 6
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, Louise’s recriminations against Charles grow more severe. Meanwhile, his worry about Elizabeth drives him into…
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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 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.
-
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.
-
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.
— 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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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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Still Life
by Marpessa Dawn Outlaw. “From the moment my friend George stepped from his loft to his death at the bottom of the building’s elevator shaft, there’s been one thing I can say I’ve known for sure—that love is dangerously overrated.”
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The Levitron
by Robert Oldshue. “Let me tell you one thing: these know-it-alls who come around hawking computerized this and that to make Shady Rest work like the Holiday Inn have never worked in a nursing home.”
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Bound
by Sam Schieren. “He had been looking at his mother. There was a look on her face he will never forget, like she’d seen through to the other side.”
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The Veil Thins
by Fiona Ennis. “She was being tugged somewhere unearthly, towards a radiant light source, the same colour as those long fluorescent white lights that buzzed in the kitchen in the convent.”
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Old Poles
by Tim Erwin. “He had a face that belonged in a Soviet bread line, waxen and expressionless, with skin tags and papules sprouting up from beneath the rough surface.”
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The Plagiarist
By Hollis Seamon. “’Why?’ Althea leaned toward the splotchy-pale student who sat in her small office chair, his wide khaki thighs overflowing its seat.”
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Lydiola
by Sarah Yahm. “The ants in her foot went back to work digging tunnels and palaces and palazzos. She willed them to leave but they lingered and malingered and trespassed.”
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High Water Mark
by Suzanne McConnell. “I regard myself in the mirror he holds up. It is spring, but damp here in Venice. The necklace lies on my blue sweater like fire.”
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Numbers
by Marcia Calhoun Forecki. “Even numbers are smooth and sweet, and can all be divided by two, which is the most perfect number of all because two means love: husband and wife, mother and child, man and dog. That should be obvious to anyone.”
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The Father Shift
by Trish Travieso. “I was twenty-three years old the first time I saw my father wearing a dress.”
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The Only Fat Man in Lascahobas
by Evan Lyon. “Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.”
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The Wills of Twenty Strangers
by Anna Mirer. “It is eleven o’clock at night, and I am stomping around with half a skull in my hand.”
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Calling Card
by Mary Luce. “It was a chilly November afternoon in a southern town so small it never made it to a map. I was in the bedroom typing when I heard the noise and then my mother’s scream. She somehow appeared at the door with her hand over her bloody abdomen and whispered, “Get the…
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Askew
by Esther K. Willison. “It gets hold of me, I wrote less than a year after her death. Somehow it creeps up.”
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A Love Story All the Same
by Claire A. Berman. “…I understood that he’d been expressing his own insecurities, not mine. I entered new relationships full of trepidation. Symptoms and appearance were inextricably bound together in my mind, necessitating constant body vigilance to control them.”
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Semantics
by Rachel Hall. “We tell our kids to give it their best shot before their big exams—calculus, say, or French—or before the championship game on a crisp autumn night, the stands filled with fans in the school colors, the stadium lights bright.”
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All Our Relations
by Jeanine Pfeiffer. “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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A Nigerian Attempts Therapy
by Ucheoma Onwutuebe. “I am a Nigerian woman, plagued by Nigerian womanly problems. When I moved to America for graduate school last summer, I believed this new country would shield me from those nagging afflictions.”
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Blood/Shed
by Alanna Weissman. “You know what they say—never trust anything that can bleed for a week without dying.”
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Yellowthroat
by Eileen Elizabeth Waggoner. “Some of y’all pray to God / I pray to the yellow warblers / and their frail whistling / on wildfire winds…”
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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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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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Monodrama
by Rachel Hadas. “The asymmetrically lurching gait, / the austere paradox as of one hand clapping: / a unilateral dialogue.”
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Arlo
by Monica Wendel. “After putting our child to sleep, I hear gunshots – / quiet, quieter than fire alarms, fireworks, thunder, / quieter than sirens, music in the park, or backfiring cars.”
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How Humans Came to Loneliness
by Doug Ramspeck. “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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Serratia Marcescens
by Peter Sordillo. “That night, I dreamed of a city older than knowledge, / Dreamed of Serratia, climbed up from the soil, / Drawn over the fields like a long dress…”
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Printouts
by Dylan Landis. “Janet reported that gray taffeta / curtained her walls. It was delicate. When touched, the ashen silk dissolved / around her thumbprint….”
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Ode to Impotence
by Jonathan Stillerman. “Thank goodness every so often / a monument closes down / for renovation…”
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Rubies of Babylon
by Tim Suermondt. “I lie back a little dreamlike, / let Mary Immaculate take the blood she needs. / The sun has found its way inside, / enveloping all of us in its light—”
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
Fascinated by the writing journey? Love deep-diving into books and creativity? Join us this Thursday for a live, online conversation with author @Morgan_J_Talty and BLR editors @danielleofri & @doris_dwycheng
Free, RSVP:
Attention, book lovers! The next BLR BookTalk features @Morgan_J_Talty, the bestselling & award-winning author of FIRE EXIT, who will be joined in conversation by BLR's @danielleofri & @doris_dwycheng.
🗓️ Thurs, June 11, 7 p.m. ET
💻 Online, free
✨ RSVP: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2226067