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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th Anniversary Celebration
Celebrate BLR’s 25th Anniversary with us on November 12 at The Century Club in New York City!
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Bellevue Literary Review: 2026 Fall Reading
Join us on October 22 to celebrate the launch of BLR’s special 25th anniversary issue; hear from the issue’s contributors live as they read from their work.
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Applications are open for the new BLR Editorial Fellowship
BLR’s new Editorial Fellowship is a year-long mentorship program designed to introduce writers to editorial pathways and support literary engagement and citizenship.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 39 highlights
BLR’s first independently published issue, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 38 highlights
World War II-inspired cover art, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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The One-Breath Poem: A BLR Haiku Workshop
In this special BLR workshop, explore haiku as a practice of presence and attention.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 37 highlights
Exploring a good life, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 36 highlights
Literature as refuge, 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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Applications are open for the new BLR Editorial Fellowship
BLR’s new Editorial Fellowship is a year-long mentorship program designed to introduce writers to editorial pathways and support literary engagement and citizenship.
-
Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
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Coming soon! BLR’s 25th anniversary issue
Along with a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the anniversary issue of BLR includes special features including an art insert and roundtable about writing and healing.
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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 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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Announcing the BLR Book Club pick
We’re excited to announce our first pick for the BLR Book Club: Fire Exit, a novel by Morgan Talty. Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, and Harper’s Bazaar, Fire Exit is available on BLR’s Bookshop page, where a portion of every purchase goes to support community-building and…
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Announcing the 2027 BLR Literary Prizes Judges
Meet our 2027 BLR Literary Prize judges: Natalie Diaz, Daniel Mason, and Meghan O’Rourke. Submit poetry, fiction and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2026.
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Writing the Body: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
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.
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BLR & Writers Read Present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery
Watch “Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery” hosted by City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review.
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2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
— 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: Tammy Greenwood
“Nature has a way of reminding us we don’t have to try so hard; sometimes just existing is magnificent.”
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Interview: Laura E. Garrard
“I found capturing moments through poetry, rather than summarizing the entire cancer experience, to be therapeutic rather than draining.”
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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.”
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Sisters of Mercy
by Joan Leegant. “The surgeon came into the O.R. chewing gum. This was how we knew there’d be a problem. God have mercy, we mutter under our breaths…”
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Vultur Gryphus
by Daniel Seifert. “Luis unscrews a small bottle of puro and daubs Tio’s smiling mouth. In the still air, the pure alcohol makes Luis’s eyes water. Further down, he hears the deep-throated cough of a detonation. He heads toward it.”
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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 Wedding Photographer’s Assistant
by Ilana Stanger. “’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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The Awful Thing
by Christina Robertson. “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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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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The Crazy One
by Hadley Leggett. “But here I am, and here you are, and once you’ve heard the whole story, it’s your job to decide: Am I the crazy one, or is it all of you?”
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Stray Gods
by Shastri Akella. “When they play chase after, they aren’t Madhu and Boy. They’re the mythic boy gods, Krishna and Balarama, and Ajay, one of the many demons that the brothers chase and vanquish.”
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Sloth, That Wicked Siren
by Christopher Notarnicola. “Why he stopped showering, no one could say for sure, though everyone had their guesses.”
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Step-Down
by Nitin K. Ahuja. “I don’t mind the night shift. I’m still new here, granted, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I mind it.”
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by Amy V. Blakemore. “My father drove me to the appointment where we would determine what to do with the tapeworm in my stomach, the one that, in all likelihood, was not real.”
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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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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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by Pamela Schmid. “In the summer of ’76, my little sister and I were shipped off to Camp Rim Rock, set beside the leech-infested Capacon River in the woods of West Virginia.”
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Solitude
by Joan Kip. “I am back with the ‘who’ of me, the self I left behind through the seasons of my years. The ultimate prize is this reconciliation with the original, unvarnished self.”
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No One Thing
by Laura LeMoon. “The things I’ve had to do to survive were part of the price I paid to be seen…Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.”
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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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The Funeral
by Alexander Schuhr. “Tonton Charles was not a great man. He had not led an inspirational life. In fact, he had spent little of it sober.”
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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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Dark Valley
by Zoë Sprankle. “I’m too young now to know how soon imaginary play will decay and mature into rumors and cliques and senior boys with beards who look at me like I’m simultaneously a toddler and a toy.”
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Power and Light
by Paula Sergi. “She’d toss a quilt made from our outgrown skirts / over the faded couch and lie there, / holding the ache, rocking it to sleep…”
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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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Epileptic
by Mary Morris. “Within the body—/ a ghost // Ground unfastened / Contradicted space…”
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The Oncologist
by Carole Stone. “Do you have an appetite? / No. / Are you anxious? Yes. / Irritable? Yes. / I hand in the questionnaire.”
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Viewing Frida Kahlo’s ‘The Suicide of Dorothy Hale’
by Virginia Chase Sutton. “I stand before the painting a decade and a half / before I am transformed. Oil on wood panel / lush in detail—blood curdling into script, black velvet gown, / hair dressed like glory.”
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Breaking the Fever
by Robert Carr. “The tender of your reflection / inverted in chrome / as a kettle boils…”
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Edges
by Missy-Marie Montgomery. “The deer stepped out in front of my car / so politely, as if to say is this a good time? / And it happened that it was, / perfectly timed between cars and patches of ice. / I braked. She stepped gracefully across…”
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The Christmas Patient
by John Kay. “Blood draws dissolve into Christmas lights, / veins dizzy with the latest medications.”
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by Olivia Mae Longoria. “First, my mother. / Shortly after, my father. / A few of their friends, whom I call aunt or uncle. / A doctor with a chart and the result of a genetic test.”
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Thought Experiment
by Steven Cramer. “Before my pupils gape oh in unison, / I find a seat with the semi-sighted / like myself, becalmed / in our separate intermissions…”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—is "Reading the Body," a theme issue on the body & how it speaks to us. (It was also the first issue of BLR to be published independently!) Read 3 issue highlights & more in our weekly post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-39-highlights
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A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published her second most famous essay, “On Being Ill.” Written during a prolonged bout of illness the previous fall, Woolf asked why sickness—an unavoidable feature of human experience—is represented so rarely and inadequately in literature.
BLR's 25th Anniversary Issue is here! 🎉 And to celebrate it, we're welcoming authors from the issue for a live reading. 📖
Join us online on Thurs, 10/22, for an evening of new poems, stories, & essays, plus the joy of community & connection.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2437613
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—revisits past BLR Prizewinners, with more to explore in our weekly blog post. Plus, the colorful WWII-inspired cover has a story of its own. 🎨 https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-38-highlights
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