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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 28 highlights
A literary trip across the world, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 27 highlights
An exploration of our environment’s fragile nature, 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 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 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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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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
City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery live on April 12 at 1:00 PM.
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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!
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Fall Reading: Animalia LIVE!
Watch the launch celebration of BLR’s special issue, “Animalia,” featuring writing that explores how health and healing both transcend and interconnect species, and what this can teach us about being human.
— 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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To The River
by Kelly Flanigan. “I walk into Scott’s kitchen, sweaty from basketball and needing something cold to drink, and there’s his mom in just her underwear…”
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The Foreign Cinema
by Lauren Alwan. “One day in those first months after her mother’s death, Cenem resolved to finally see Los Angeles. She’d spent the afternoon at one of the cheap matinees, seeing Casablanca yet again, and after, went directly to the used bookstore off Taksim Square in search of a copy of Baedecker’s California.”
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Peer Review
by Kristen Swan Morrison. “There’s an infiltration in the group. I sense it. I see it a mile away.”
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The Plagiarist
By Hollis Seamon. “’Why?’ Althea leaned toward the splotchy-pale student who sat in her small office chair, his wide khaki thighs overflowing its seat.”
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il Faut
by Stephanie Hammer. “Now he stares at the bag of bulbs, the naked little bodies burgeoning, begging for life in the sweet dark ground. The ground that buries.”
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Pale Unhappy Dog
by Angie Sijun Lou. “Li has never seen a kidney, but he imagines a flesh-colored ball the size of a fist. He wonders how he will transport it on his motorcycle, whether he will seal it inside a plastic bag with duct tape or place it in a cooler lined with ice.”
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Seeing Things
by Deena Linett. “I called him Lark although his given name is Laurie. I made it up, a love-name, so I reckon when they asked him for a name he said what came to mind, quick-like, and told them Lark.”
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Assisted Living
by Louise Aronson. “Mary’s not at dinner and no one knows why. Roy is limping but at least he’s up walking again after last month when he fell by the mailboxes and dislocated his new knee.”
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Girls, at Play
by Celeste Ng. “This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue.”
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Looking at Aquaman
by Kim Foster. “Something nobody warns you about, when you get very sick, is that you have to be polite. You have to be Emily f-ing Post every minute of the day…”
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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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Two Thoracotomies
by Angela Tang-Tan. “The first time I witness a thorax opened, it is on a twenty-five-gram mouse. Heavier than most because she is gravid. The second time, it’s on a thirty-year-old man.”
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Radon Gas and the Believers
by Andrew C. Gottlieb. “But its impossible to go very far without seeing a sudden dark opening, the sloping, rotting framing of an abandoned mine entrance, or the colorful, dangerous scree sloping downhill: the remnant tailings from the ore processing that once happened here, spilling from a now filled-in shaft that one hundred years ago…
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Our Eyes Were Watching Marcia
by Samuel A. Autman. “Television had always been a perfect distraction from our family’s drama and trauma, soothing us more than our Baptist faith.”
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Breathing
by Shanda McManus. “My office is quiet except for the noise I make: the click of the light switch, the hum of the computer, the crinkle of my paper gown as I unwrap it. I pull on my PPE—gown, gloves, mask, and goggles—makeshift protection as I evaluate patients for suspected Covid infection.”
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Forty-One Months
by William McGrath. “Thato is a small sad boy who has come to stay at the safe home in Lesotho, up in the cloudvoid in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong district. His mother is dead and his father is off working somewhere…”
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Flu Shot
by David Watts. “She stands in my examining room unable to sit, pacing, then stopping tensely, as if paralyzed by the urge to pace. Three times she has made this appointment, three times a no-show.”
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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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A Doctor in the Court of the King of Nepal
by Itzhak Kronzon. “I labored to decipher the pidgin English until I at last understood that the King of Nepal wanted me, Dr. Itzhak Kronzon of the Bronx Municipal Hospital, to come to his royal court.”
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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 Shed
by Elana Bell. “Each time something went missing— / the photo album of my first / year, postcard from a forgotten friend…”
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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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Animals Decide When to Die
by Jayne Marek. “Old cat, my little love, as you withdraw / along with the declining days in October / and fold yourself into slanting light, / you seem quiet and neat as rolled-up socks.”
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Speech
by Laurie Klein. “Lock that tongue to the roof / of your mouth, the therapist says, / eyeing the trach / at the base of her throat.”
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Chronic Pain as Paperweight Hand-Blown at the Glass Factory
by Lena Crown. “Inside the clear glass orb whirl two ribbons / of orange and blue, a goldfish in a bowl.”
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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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My Friend in Flapping Stages Tries to Take Flight
by Rochelle Robinson-Dukes. “April is my favorite month. / Its stormy flowers / and puddled rainbows are captivating / as is the lightning / that breaks cool spring nights / like a child’s scribble.”
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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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We Are Afraid
by Jennifer L. Knox. “We are afraid / of junior high school students and the nauseating things / they say among their own kind…”
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Arlo
by Monica Wendel. “After putting our child to sleep, I hear gunshots – / quiet, quieter than fire alarms, fireworks, thunder, / quieter than sirens, music in the park, or backfiring cars.”
This week's featured issue "offers a literary jaunt through unusual locales and intriguing set-ups," editor @danielleofri notes in her foreword. Thank you for joining us on our jaunt through the BLR archive as part of our 25th anniversary celebration 🎉 https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-28-highlights
4This week's featured issue — part of our 25th anniversary lookback — explores our fragile environment and its impact on our lives and health. Enjoy three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-27-highlights
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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
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