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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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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 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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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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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 31 highlights
The art of memory, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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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 30 highlights
A chapter closes on BLR’s archival cover photos, 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: 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. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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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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The Kings of Gowanus
by Rae Meadows. “He spent his days, like most boys in the neighborhood, walking around, looking to get something for nothing. But today was fight day.”
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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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Free Love
by Allegra Hyde. “At Free Oaks, I perched in the laps of transient poets and tugged at the robes of bilingual maharishi, collecting nuggets of enlightenment like stones.”
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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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High Water Mark
by Suzanne McConnell. “I regard myself in the mirror he holds up. It is spring, but damp here in Venice. The necklace lies on my blue sweater like fire.”
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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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by Ellen Collins. “We have forgotten how to tie our shoes, how to button our sweaters, how to hold a fork. We have lost the ability to add a column of numbers, to trace a route on a map, to color inside of the lines, to sip through a straw.”
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Getting in Trouble
by Ed Meek. “I drive slowly and I know people are angry at me—hitting their horns and cursing, giving me the finger. I just smile and keep going.”
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In Lieu of a Better Plan
by Elizabeth Downs. “One otherwise pleasant evening at the asylum, I—a known murderess and recently declared Vice President of Ward G—escape through a partially opened, third-story window.”
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Snapshots of Bellevue
by Sandra Opdycke. “When sick New Yorkers failed to find a place in private institutions like New York Hospital, they turned to public hospitals like Bellevue.”
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How Air Moves
by Leslie Roberts. “Underneath is a body cast, my new ectoskeleton, my nautilus, crawled into, where I live now.”
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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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Subway Stories
by William Walker. “My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.”
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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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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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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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Motherhood Requiem
by Nadia Ghent. “One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen. She had gone to the hospital in the middle of the night with my stepfather—a psychiatrist, but not hers—and after I came home from school that…
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Snapshots of Bellevue
by Dewitt Stetten, Jr. “On the east side of First Avenue, between 26th and 31st Streets in Manhattan, stood the ancient brick pile that was Bellevue Hospital.”
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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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Shroud
by Ted Morrissey. “Your left-behind clothes still occupy closets and / clotheslines in the basement. She refuses to / donate them away, / insisting that family may want / them (implying should want them).”
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Sonnet for Lidwina, Patron Saint of MS
by Alene Terzian-Zeitounian. “If I had a time machine, I would tell / you the suffering isn’t worth the fame”
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Carousel
by Matthew Ladd. “The Pacific Ocean, to a child of three, / sounds like a push-broom in his mother’s kitchen. / Life took us elsewhere: like other boys, I learned…”
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Clínica Hispana
by Hillary Kobernick. “I am reading Spanish posters / and wondering about stomach aches— / mine, mostly.”
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Dementia Unit for John Glenn
by Amy Rothschild. “You toss a pale bagel onto his plate, / do some hand-waving around / the problem of gravity.”
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In the British Library Repository
by Katie Chaple. “The other man holds the letters / to his nose, inhaling deeply. / One letter after another he lifts and smells, / making two piles.”
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Etymology of Chlorophyll
by Caroline Harper New. “Love, / from Germanic lufu, is intestinal and milky / like undug onions squeezed from mothers.”
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Fantaisie in F Minor, Op. 149
by Jaydn DeWald. “I believe my girlfriend may be playing for somebody else in the audience. Her face, when lifted, seems to drift toward the middle-back row of seats.”
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Ahihi Bay
by Floyd Skloot. “So far this morning has been cool and gray but as she walks backward into the sea, adjusting her snorkel and mask, sunlight appears over Haleakala’s cone…”
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When Fire Arrives
by Sharon Pretti. “It’s all wrong, today’s sun, / a welt in the fire-smoke sky.”
It's been a thrill to look back through our issues this year, as part of our 25th anniversary 🎉 This week, we're sharing Issue 34. Read three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-34-highlights
4This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—focuses on finding home in family and connections, with stories, essays & poems that dive into this universal theme. Read three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-33-highlights
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And we're so excited that there will be ASL interpretation for the event.
#poetrycommunity #ASL #poetrylovers #SignLanguage #AmericanSignLanguage