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— Everything BLR. —
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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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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 workshop.
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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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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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Remembering September 11th
2026 marks 25 years since the devastating 9/11 attacks. Even after all these years, it still feels impossible to wrap one’s mind around the enormity and barbarity of that day…
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 35 highlights
A look back at BLR’s redesign, 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 34 highlights
Spotlight on the last issue to feature our original layout and style, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Art and Medicine: Supporting Compassion Through Creativity
Enjoy cocktails, conversation, and community, while supporting BLR’s Art in Medicine program.
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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.
-
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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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.
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Announcing the 2026 BLR Prizewinners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes.
— 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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Recoil
by Trenton Streeting. “After my father’s disk sander had whirred to halt, he turned to me and gestured majestically. ‘Matthew, the work is always the best pay.'”
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A Vehicular Situation
by Maija Stromberg. “’Well, here’s the good Dr. Kaspar stuck out in a field in the middle of nowhere,’ LeeAnn said.”
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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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Thinking in Clichés
by Denitza Blagev. “After all the pain and blood, you almost begin to think of death as the next therapy, because that’s what it is, you realize. Death is part of the process.”
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If Brains Was Gas
by Abraham Verghese. “I turned thirteen that week. I assumed that it came with some new liberties, but no one had specifically said so, and I was too uncertain to ask. Still, the night after my birthday, Elmo and me made plans to go out.”
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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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Periscope
by Anne Elliott. “Caroline listened to the bellows under her bed, drawing and blowing air. The room asserted itself, always, its rhythmic hiss and pop of machinery, the anti-lullaby of metal cocoons, rows of them, each containing a complicated person.”
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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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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 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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Given
by Nancy Devine. “This must be the first harvest from our acreage: our young vineyard singing, the plastic, ribbed grow tubes that make little greenhouses for each of the young grape plants catching wind and, like a throat and its vocal chords, producing a note.”
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Lone Wolf
by Ellen Gunnarsdottir. “‘That’s just how he is, our dear doctor,’ people would say, and by this would they meant that it was this very energy that had sent him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a member of Iceland’s water polo team, and later to escape from occupied Denmark on a leaky old…
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Close to the Bones
by Amy Nolan. “It was a relentlessly sunny day in July, a week after my fifteenth birthday, when I was admitted to the hospital. I remember staring out the side window of the Chevette’s back seat, trying to follow the hypnotic movement of the unraveling yellow line…”
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Songs from the Black Chair
by Charles Barber. “A thousand men each year sit in the black chair next to my desk. I am a mental health worker at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter.”
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Breaking Point
by Eileen Cronin. “Our heads are filled with the native rhythm of an aerobic beat and hot anticipation.”
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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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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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By My Own Hand
by Anita Darcel Taylor. “Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.”
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Harvest Moon
by Julia Michie Bruckner. “He’d looked perfect – nothing deformed or discolored, no hair out of place, both shoelaces tied. The life had been shaken out of him.”
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Okahandja Lessons
by Emily Rapp. “Welcome to Namibia! The battered wooden sign stood at the edge of a highway that was strewn with piles of twisted, smoking metal.”
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Price Tag
by Alma Gaxiola. “If every life’s a story / Then their’s will always be worth more / Mine was drowned out by the water / Running like fathers for the door…”
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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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Monitor
by Jerome Ellison Murphy. “Now it’s loose in the house, and out back. / Lop away its extremities, they swell back fat.”
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Blood Test
by Judith Harris. “These lone fires will never die out. / the roses still stagger in the embers; / Light is prolific, everywhere.”
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A History of Melasma
by Jen Karetnick. “All that ink on your skin! / bartenders would marvel. / Cosmos at my elbow…”
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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…”
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Cleaver
by Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador. “I do not think about flesh anymore, but if I did, / I would tell you about its adoration / for cruelty.”
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Treatment
by Laurie Kutchins. “Every underworld begins with a rabbit hole, a vent in the earth. / Noisy boys peering down, running home for lanterns and rope, a / Dizzy girl meanwhile tumbling into it.”
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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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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.”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—revisits the 2019 BLR Prizewinners, with more to explore in our weekly blog post. Plus, the most spring-like cover 🌸 in BLR's history! https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-36-highlights
4Ready to welcome your fall days with a great new read? 📖 🎉 Pre-order your copy of BLR's upcoming 25th anniversary issue! In addition to a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, check out all the extras in this special expanded issue! https://blreview.org/product/blr-issue-51/
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Why does medicine need creativity? Join BLR’s upcoming online workshop to discover how art and literature can be accessible guides for navigating the often unsettling waters of illness, caregiving, and healing. (Sept. 24 @ 7pm, online, $25) https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2061300
#medhum