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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 26 highlights
The circus comes to Bellevue, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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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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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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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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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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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 26 highlights
The circus comes to Bellevue, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
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.
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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 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.
— 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: 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.”
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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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Halfway to the Afterlife
by Parker Desautell. “I had come into the hospital as I came into the world—twitching, foaming, groaning. I was almost brain-dead, they said, yet here I was, good as reborn.”
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Parricide
by Steve Fayer. “My father killed his mother, confessed it to me in his last year as the black dog of depression chased him toward his own grave.”
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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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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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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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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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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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Atrophy
by Lauren Erin O’Brien. “Yarrow doesn’t say much aside from being strange but that’s less him and more his parents, if he even has those. He doesn’t seem like the type to come from a womb.”
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Snow Over Hartford
by Dan Pope. “Mulvaney passed him the water cup, directed the straw toward his lips. From the hallway he heard the yelp of a police radio—the Hartford cops, pacing the floor, waiting on him, drinking hospital coffee.”
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A Brutal Sweetness
by Abby Nance. “Last night my breath changed from quiet to labored heaving. We all wonder: will this be my last bath?”
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Frontline
by D. Liebhart. “When she was in her armchair, I brought her breakfast. She took a single bite then put down her spoon. “This is stupid,” she said. “This is only going to make it last longer.””
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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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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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A Pure and Lovely Flame
by Sandy Woodson. “For Descartes, the pineal gland is a magical place where our souls and personality and identity shimmer in a night sky.”
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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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The Tag
by Elizabeth Crowell. “Dr. H’s earnestness was more apparent the second time we met with him, when we weren’t hearing the bad news for the first time. In a full-lit room not dimmed for ultrasounds, he was a handsome, dark-haired man, a decade younger than Cheryl and I.”
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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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Tethered to the Body
by Jane Kokernak. “There is only illness, and there is no way to make that sexy. After several years as a medical device wearer, I know.”
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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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Dispatch From Bewilderness
by Judith Hannah Weiss. “Probes puncture my scalp, surveying my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, you name it; there’s a probe for the lobe.”
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The Practice of Cleaning
by Sarah Nance. “My mother knows there are three / ways to be clean: to take a mess / that’s there and cover it…”
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A Zoom Call, Before Treatment
by Kan Ren Jie. “He has started praying – / my mother says, clenching in her hands / a blurry set of pixels.”
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Letter from a Code Talker, 1945
by Sean Sam. “The commanders wish me to say / the language beaten from me. / Each time I speak another sun / drops from the abnormal sky.”
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Autumn Crickets
As late sun fades/ through the haze/ of their sound
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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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The Beauty of Music Doesn’t Have to Be Human
by George Looney. “Any other day / I might give up & swallow every sound / I could utter. Not today, the wind / in cahoots with what I want, / what I need, to believe.”
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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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if i die at thirty five
by Abba Belgrave. “there will be / no burial burn / the body cancer / cratered toss…”
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Before Another CT Scan
by Deborah Golub. “Think your lungs a forest cleared. / Your breath winged / as if it had a better place to go…”
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Weaning: First Day of School
by Wendy Wisner. “is out the window, along with a tinge / of yellow on the oak trees. Last night I dreamt / I took my college job back—typing, data entry—”
How can creativity help us make sense of medicine’s complexities? Join BLR for an engaging class that explores how art & literature can be guides for navigating the unsettling waters of illness, caregiving, & healing.
🗓️ Sept. 24, 7 pm ET
💻 Online
🔷 $25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2061300
This week's issue highlight looks back at past contest winners, including a story that won a Pushcart Prize (and might also take the prize for most unique title!): "Death Defiant Bomba or What to Wear When Your Boo Gets Cancer" by Lilliam Rivera https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-26-highlights
4This 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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