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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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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 past BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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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 Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 5
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, history, illness, and identity weave their way through the story.
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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 Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 4
Every week, we will be discussing a section of FIRE EXIT, the first pick of BLR’s Book Club. This week, Charles is visited by his childhood friend Gizos.
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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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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 13 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.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 12 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.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 11 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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Letters to Michiko
by Leslie Jamison. “God knows my father did his share of speed, but it was the smoking that finally got him.”
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Eruv
by David Milofsky. “Dotty Adams remarked that she hadn’t known there were any Jews in the neighborhood. Some people wondered if the men in long black coats and broad-brimmed hats were Goths, like those boys at Columbine.”
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The Beautiful Ones
by Don Zancanella. “I grew up in a working-class suburb of Denver with a mother who was a functioning alcoholic and a father who sold office supplies and was frequently on the road. I dropped out of school at sixteen and started supporting myself…”
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Ghosts of Doubt
by Gregg Cusick. “He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty- something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves…
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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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Convergence
by Kathryn Kulpa. “It’s going to happen today. He can feel it waiting to happen, because he’s wanted to know for so long. There are people who live to satisfy curiosity, and Derrick is one of them.”
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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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We Are Only Human
by Mahak Jain. “My mother believed it was important for a child to witness healthy communication about difficult topics. My father allowed this as long as I remained quiet and didn’t interfere.”
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We the Mothers
Kathi Hansen “We’re not saying our boys are angels, … we’re just saying that we the mothers didn’t need to teach our boys not to rape.”
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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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You Know What She Means
by Elizabeth Schultz. “And here is another thing you do not remember: your parents telling you that you have polio, and that they are taking you to St. Margaret’s Hospital in Northridge.”
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The Consolation of Anatomy
by Kurt Magsamen. “Cadavers don’t look much like anatomy drawings. They don’t smell much like anatomy books. The drawings are clean, ordered, the striations of muscle cells combed out tight and smooth, like the strings of a harp…”
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Flu Shot
by David Watts. “She stands in my examining room unable to sit, pacing, then stopping tensely, as if paralyzed by the urge to pace. Three times she has made this appointment, three times a no-show.”
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Family Portrait, Guam, 1979
by Katherine Lien Chariott. “I know who you are. You are the girl of twenty, in that black and white photograph I held onto for years, that girl so beautiful she filled me with shame, just as she filled me with pride.”
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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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Every Day Anew
by Pia Jee-Hae Baur. “I dislike switching doctors, primarily because every time I have to recount my medical history, I have to decide how much I should lie.”
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Refugere
by Nina Adel. “Any place a place of refuge. Any place, as long as it’s not the place you’ve left. Live anywhere, but always leave the back door open.”
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Canine Cardiology
by Deborah Thompson. “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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Bloodlines
by Anne Rudig. “The blood I wished was mine almost killed Mindy. I began to wonder whether it wasn’t such a bad thing we weren’t related, but the thought felt so disloyal I dismissed it as soon as I could.”
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A Staircase in the Fog
by Robin Fast. “Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast is memory. It was wintertime thirty-five years ago when I learned that family afflictions, like weather, come at you from beyond.”
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Looking Back
by Floyd Skloot. “summer lose its grip. Nothing more / than a waning of the scents that dwelt / all season near the hilltop…”
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Our Cat at the Winter Solstice
by Joan I. Siegel. “He does not wait for the sun’s return. Instead he makes a pillow of darkness to stretch inside this longest night…”
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Conversation with a Dead Poet
by Eleonora Luongo. “I kept them all. The poems, I mean. When I / tried to tell your mother, she’d leaned in, said,…”
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Crayons
by Emily Sullivan Sanford. “Every spring I must explain my arms to children, / before my legs arrive in summer.”
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Chronic Care: “Broken Leg” by Keith Carter, Photograph (Toned Gelatin Silver Print 1998)
by Laurie Clements Lambeth. “The girl in black dress and tights stands behind the fawn, / hands clasped, their white blur forming almost / a heart.”
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Rabbit Walk
by Brett Warren. “All around me, trees and shrubs infringe / on gravestones, while lichens write their stories / over names and dates. Under the ground, / where once I imagined only the remains…”
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Her Marked Black Body
by Cynthia Parker-Ohene. “The macabre moon / Once lunged at me / It hisses red / Hangs voyeuristically / Wants me to stand in its balkanized light.”
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After Another School Shooting, I Drive the Back Roads of New Hampshire
by Deborah Murphy. “Late June fields greening / under a mottled sky. / An oriole slashes orange / against a shingled Cape Cod.”
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Baptism
by Michele Bombardier. “I pull up a chair, lower the bedrails. / He bats at my hand. When he finds it, he quiets, / his hand a vice on mine.”
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A History of Melasma
by Jen Karetnick. “All that ink on your skin! / bartenders would marvel. / Cosmos at my elbow…”
Literary journals help nurture writers' careers. This week's featured issue includes early writing by authors who went on to become national bestsellers: Kali Fajardo-Anstine & Celeste Ng, whose story is highlighted here as part of our 25th anniv lookback. https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-19-highlights
4This week, we revisit an early contest issue. 📖 Three pieces from Issue 18 are highlighted here, as part of our 25th anniversary lookback. Fun fact: poet Amanda Auchter is the only prizewinner to be awarded 1st place & hon. mention in the same year! https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-18-highlights
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The Bellevue Literary Review is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The journal has also grown into a larger literary arts organization with events, writing workshops and more.