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— Everything BLR. —
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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 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 featured on PBS News Hour’s CANVAS Series
Watch PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown report on BLR’s 25th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri and BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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What We’re Reading Now
Looking for your next literary escape? Here are some recommended reads from our editorial team.
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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 BookTalk with Author Morgan Talty
Join us on June 11 for a live conversation as we dive into Morgan’s book Fire Exit, which was the inaugural selection for BLR’s new Book Club.
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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 Book Club | “Fire Exit” Week 7
In this final week of the BLR Book Club’s review of FIRE EXIT, the question of whether Charles will have a relationship with Elizabeth in the future persists.
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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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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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.
-
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.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
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.
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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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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 17 highlights
The power of intimate storytelling, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 16 highlights
Stories, poems, and essays on the immense emotional landscape of illness, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 15 highlights
Thought-provoking reads on the vast range of abilities and disabilities, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 14 highlights
Throughout our 25th anniversary year, we’re marking this milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, with special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
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: 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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Examining Rooms
by Midge Raymond. “These future doctors need to make a personal connection, to take the time to discuss next steps, to listen . . . Expressing the symptoms of pain is one thing—judging people on their performances is another.”
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Terminal Device
by Jennifer Lee. “Physical therapy is in the basement of the hospital, and they send them down in wheelchairs right after surgery. It hurts, and people are always telling me what they can’t do—like I’m their sister and this is some confidence they share—but it’s best to get them moving as soon as possible.”
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The Tribulations of Uncle Ned
by Stephanie Wrobel. “I knew years ago that the paternal gene was missing. I should not, would not, be relied on by other humans, especially small, defenseless ones.”
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Afternoon Heat
by Vishwas R. Gaitonde. “Summer sapped the energy out of us all, the patients in the waiting room under a whirring fan and I in my consulting room.”
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The Father of Joan of Arc
by Ron Rindo. “Two months after the loss of my only child, whose death—for which I am responsible—came in an unspeakable manner, I stand in line at the gas station, waiting to pay for my gas.”
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Old Poles
by Tim Erwin. “He had a face that belonged in a Soviet bread line, waxen and expressionless, with skin tags and papules sprouting up from beneath the rough surface.”
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In This Skin
by Emma Pattee. “’The difference between a good butthole and a bad butthole is the wink.’ This is the best man talking.”
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Evacuation Instructions
by Elliott Hold. “With the fat stripped away, she is her essential self. They don’t tell you how beautiful people can be when they’re dying.”
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Plazoleta
by Eric Stener Carlson. “The ants climbed up the front of Macedonio’s sweater, circling the buttons. They arrived at Macedonio’s chest, interested in a yogurt stain. “
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The Gun Goes Off and At First No One Knows Who’s Been Hit
by Ian Baaske. “Someone’s died. I know this because of vague posts on Facebook. It can’t be anyone I know very well, or I’d have texts or phone calls or, well, something.”
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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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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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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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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 Only Fat Man in Lascahobas
by Evan Lyon. “Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.”
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Lost Vessels
by Jehanne Dubrow. “Memory is not kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing damaged ceramics with a mixture of lacquer and powdered gold. There are ugly seams. There is no glittering dust poured into the fractures between sentences.”
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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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Mad Love
by Acamea Deadwiler. “You don’t know hunger. Not like we did. You don’t know hunger that surpasses pain. When your body is too weak to send distress signals. When your organs have shifted from fight to flight, to surrender. When you don’t even have energy to fuel the aching. I’ve been there.”
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IN THE MARGIN
by Ha Jin. “For many years I refused to be an exile, claiming that I am an immigrant, someone who chose to move to a new country voluntarily.”
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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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School Shooting
by Adam Scheffler. “After today’s rain / all that’s left / of the planets / green and pink / they’d chalked / on the sidewalk…”
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Chaas Curry
by E. Hume Covey. “Two months into her illness, Pat / lay in pain, nearly immobile, / nourished by pills and liquids, / no appetite even for favorite foods…”
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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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Because You Are Dead You Think You Can Have Anything You Want
by Dannye Romine Powell. “You come back, / bent over my things / like a collector, hunched, / touching, wanting to lay claim / to everything.”
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Gone
by Carolyn Welch Scarbrough. “William’s letter uses suicided as a verb / and really why not? The finite action // verb—without an introduction, unreduced by / other verbs, other introductory phrases…”
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Relic
by Stacy Nigliazzo. “Quietly, they concede, / leaving pennies / at your feet.”
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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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Out Back, Behind the Hospital
Steve Cushman. “We shared cigarettes and jokes / talked about anything except / what we’d seen, the baby we’d X-rayed, / his bruises…”
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Valentine
by Chelsea Krieg. “For minutes,/ I watch his heart: ventricles contracting, / blood pumping – my other silent pulsing center.”
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Anatomy Lesson
by Nellie Hill. “To understand the heart / you’ve got to memorize arteries, vessels, / and which goes where, which is red / and which is blue, what’s likely to pop open–“
It's an exciting time to be part of the BLR community, with new releases & milestones from our authors. 🎉 A few highlights—including recent @penamerica awards for Aracelis Girmay & Pria Anand—are shown here, plus there’s even more in our recent roundup: https://tinyurl.com/34cjy225
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Polish it up, send it out! Opportunities from...
@iselemagazine
@narrativemag
@blreview - specifically for work (all genres) on the themes of health, illness, and healing (note the amazing judges!)
@fourwaybooks
@storybottleco
This week's featured issue — part of our 25th anniversary lookback— showcases winners of our annual contest and much more. The BLR Prizes for this issue were selected by judges Francine Prose, Cornelius Eady, and Susan Orlean.
https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-22-highlights