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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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Plazoleta
by Eric Stener Carlson. “The ants climbed up the front of Macedonio’s sweater, circling the buttons. They arrived at Macedonio’s chest, interested in a yogurt stain. “
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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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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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In Another Life
by Lara Palmqvist. “The two of them stand framed together in the fragile glass, she thin-faced with a worried mouth, he like a wisp of smoke with flint at its center, vulnerable but still volatile within.”
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Beenie at Fourteen
by Margaret Buckhanon. “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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Translation Memory
by Midge Raymond. “For days he came home to find her in the same spot, staring at an empty street. When she turned to him, her eyes looked like thin wet glass, as if the slightest sound could shatter them.”
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il Faut
by Stephanie Hammer. “Now he stares at the bag of bulbs, the naked little bodies burgeoning, begging for life in the sweet dark ground. The ground that buries.”
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The Mona Lisa
by Robert Oldshue. “Now it might seem that a nursing home with only two floors and forty – seven residents would be a hard place to lose somebody.”
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Looking at Aquaman
by Kim Foster. “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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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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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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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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A Figment of Your Imagination
by Cynthia-Marie O’Brien. “I am a figment of your imagination. You may laugh skeptically, and I admit there is much that would seem to prove I am anything but…”
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Mending Petals
by Mary Arguelles. “I don’t even know why I want a tattoo. Maybe to commemorate the missing breast. Maybe to re-define beauty. Maybe just to cover the scar. All I know is something about the space screams canvas.”
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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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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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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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Obligation
by Leopold Szor. “No wonder that now, on the streets of Lvov, one could see smiles on the faces looking out the windows. Theirs was a joy of expectation. The hour of revenge was coming! The Jews of Lvov already knew what had been going on in German-occupied Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. But, so far,…
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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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Drawing Blood
by Laura Johnsrude. “I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it.”
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After the Loss of My Daughter to Suicide
by Laura Apol. “on her desk / there was a handwritten list of guns / there was the cash receipt for the gun…”
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Ahihi Bay
by Floyd Skloot. “So far this morning has been cool and gray but as she walks backward into the sea, adjusting her snorkel and mask, sunlight appears over Haleakala’s cone…”
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Glaucoma
by Charlene Fix. “What my eyes see reminds me of under-exposed / negatives from my bygone wet photography days, / days replete with eyes—the camera’s, the enlarger’s, mine—”
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Getting Over a Cold
by Margaret Kogan. “First open the windows and empty the garbage. / Next start the laundry, lights and darks. / Strip the bed, wash sheets, pillowcases, / mattress and quilt covers, mats and towels.”
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Animals Decide When to Die
by Jayne Marek. “Old cat, my little love, as you withdraw / along with the declining days in October / and fold yourself into slanting light, / you seem quiet and neat as rolled-up socks.”
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Fertile
by Kai Coggin. “make a whole ecosystem under my touch / huddle the howling fox the heavy elephant…”
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Without Fear of Being Burned
by Adam Possner. “I hear you just beyond reach / of the flickering light of / the TV, which you’ve kindled / as a kind of controlled burn…”
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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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“Never Send…”
by Vincent Casaregola. “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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Above the Angels
by Philip Levine. “A row of corrugated gray huts / hunkering down in the November rain. / Across the way the fire burns night and day / though unseen now in first light.”
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
Today is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. BLR was proud to partner w/ @NorthwellHealth Center for Gun Violence Prevention on a multimedia project exploring how we can bring the arts into the conversation when grappling with the enormity of gun violence https://blreview.org/table-of-contents/storytelling-gun-violence/
This week's featured issue of BLR takes us back to our 10th anniv, a milestone that was shared by Bellevue Hospital's 275th. The expanded issue contains "Illness as Muse" by Rafael Campo, highlighted here as part of our 25th anniversary lookback. https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-21-highlights
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