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— Everything BLR. —
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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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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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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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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 33 highlights
Finding home in family and connections, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 32 highlights
The nuances of relationships impacted by 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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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.
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Be part of the “Narrative Arc”: Tell us about your favorite BLR poem, story, or essay
One of the ways we’ll be celebrating BLR’s 25th anniversary is with a new Narrative Arc event… which means another opportunity to share your voice with our community!
— 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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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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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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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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Lydiola
by Sarah Yahm. “The ants in her foot went back to work digging tunnels and palaces and palazzos. She willed them to leave but they lingered and malingered and trespassed.”
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Mushroom Death Suit
by Tyriek White. “She shrunk away; a cold, spring evening. Like the harsh, white light to a newborn. Too many knives and machines and opening and closing. Stitching and restitching. Blood in and blood out.”
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Last Stop
by Daniel Pope. “Outside the train station a man lies on the concrete brick walkway, his head resting in a pool of blood. His skull is buzzed and the blood leaks brightly out of a wound above his left temple. Just beyond the pool is his camouflage-patterned cap.”
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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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Avtomat Kalashnikova
by Rachel Hall. “Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out.”
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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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Taxi Ride
by Azin Neishaboori. “It was around noon on a spring day in the month of May when Ms. Abedi appeared at the intersection of Shahrara and Sattar Khan Streets on the west side of Tehran.”
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Your Cane
by Sabah Parsa. “I still remember the sound of the rubber thumping rhythmically against the carpet as you walked, slow and steady. Whenever I heard it, I knew it was you.”
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Exene
by Kate Broad. “My family must have read some theory, or made it up themselves, that having a pet could help lower suicide risk. An animal was something to believe in, to hold close—a reason to get up each day.”
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Illness as Muse
by Rafael Campo. “It is not unusual, after I’ve given a poetry reading, for some impossibly young writer from the audience to remark over the post-literary pretzels and Diet Coke, “Wow, your stuff is really depressing.’’
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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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Dust, Light, Life
by Jacqueline Kolosov. “‘Why are there so many moths near the lamp, Mama?’ my five-year-old daughter Sophie asked, as we sat at our patio table a few weeks ago, the purple-rose of twilight of late April having by now given way to night.”
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Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War
by Diane Cameron. “In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living room, both perforated with bullets.”
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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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Blood/Shed
by Alanna Weissman. “You know what they say—never trust anything that can bleed for a week without dying.”
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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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Claiming Missing Inheritance
by Jack Lancaster. “At the Whitney Museum, David Wojnarowicz’s portrait of his friend Peter Hujar claims its own wall. Ten feet back, I twist from parallel to perpendicular, unexpectedly lingering instead of walking by.”
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The Healer
by Nylah Lyman. “For months, her determined hands / coaxed the sickness up and out of my lungs / until it came to rest, eventually, in her own—”
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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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Autumn Crickets
As late sun fades/ through the haze/ of their sound
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Call and Response
by Tammy C. Greenwood. “When the owl fledglings fall from their nest,/ I consider not inserting myself into their fate, / watch the siblings hobble from pepper tree shade / to the safety of buckwheat.”
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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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Surviving You
by Anthony Ageuro. “I don’t know how I did it, / loved you all those years in the quiet landscape / of a burning vineyard, of a toppling mountain…”
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Synaptic Space
by Julie Dunlop. “What happens in that leap / that in-between, that cleft?”
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Relic
by Stacy Nigliazzo. “Quietly, they concede, / leaving pennies / at your feet.”
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Describe a morning you woke without fear.
by Jacqueline Jones LaMon. “It is four in the darkness and you cannot breathe. / You cannot will your chest to expand, and suddenly, / this is all right.”
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She Misses and Wishes We Could All Live Together
by Muriel Nelson. “We lean close to admire the web / then blow on it // gently.”
"Today 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...of that day," writes editor @danielleofri. When ordinary words fail, turning to literature can help. https://blreview.org/blog/remembering-september-11th
NYC Friends: A very special reading and conversation TONIGHT, 7pm, out back @UnnameableB, 615 Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. This is the launch of veteran writer, editor, and teacher Suzanne McConnell’s debut story collection, <<If You Think Your Heart Can Take
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—highlights poetry & prose on displacement, allowing readers to grapple with the upending of the familiar, the shifting of lives, and the geographical & emotional sense of belonging elsewhere. https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-35-highlights
4We are thrilled that BLR Board Member (and author) Perri Klass is receiving this well-deserved award. Her work -- as a pediatrician, writer, and National Medical Director of @reachoutandread -- has improved the lives of children and communities for decades. 📖🫶
We are delighted to announce Perri Klass, MD—pediatrician, writer, and longtime National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read—as the recipient of the 2026 Literarian Award.
Read the @usatoday article to learn more 🔗
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2026/09/08/national-book-awards-literarian-perri-klass/91561226007/