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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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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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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.
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Sick! True Short Stories About Illness, Recovery, and More
BLR is excited to collaborate with Writers Read on an upcoming storytelling event in which writers get to read their tales live on stage.
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Crafting a Story of Illness: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
Watch Crafting a Story of Illness, which brought together four best-selling authors whose work spans the worlds of literature and healthcare for a rich conversation on writing about the body, illness, and healing.
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Announcing the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes Judges
Meet our 2026 BLR Literary Prize judges! Submit your best poetry, fiction and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2025.
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2024 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
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2025 BLR Prize Winners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2025 BLR Literary Prizes.
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BLR Spring 2024 Reading: Winning Words
Meet the writers and editors behind BLR’s Issue 46, our latest contest issue featuring the winners of the 2024 BLR Prizes. Featuring readings by Shastri Akella, Misty Kiwak Jacobs, and Amy Rothschild With interviews by BLR editors Doris W. Cheng, Danielle Ofri, and Saleem Hue Penny Plus additional poetry by William Klein, Siobhan McKenna, and Carolene Kurien Online, Thursday, May 23 at…
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BLR Studio Visit: An Evening of Art and Stories
Join BLR and L’Space Gallery to celebrate the launch of our latest issue and its cover artist, Nicole Cohen. Featuring readings by Purvi Shah and Siobhan McKenna, and the premiere of Nicole Cohen’s Contemporary Art Books & New York Library video projection. In-person, Thursday, April 4th at 6:00 pm ET L’Space Gallery524 W 19th StNew York,…
— 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: 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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Geese
by Grace Glass. “Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does it quietly, because Rosie works third shift and needs her sleep. Before he hurt his…
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SUTHY Syndrome
by Hollis Seamon. “I shit you not. Right in front of the elevator that spits you into our hospice, there is—get ready for this—a harpist. I mean, isn’t that like a teensy bit premature?”
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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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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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Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)
by C. J. Hribal. “At first you don’t. You hold back. Finally she says, ‘What, you’re afraid I’ll break? You’re afraid it’s contagious?'”
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Sloth, That Wicked Siren
by Christopher Notarnicola. “Why he stopped showering, no one could say for sure, though everyone had their guesses.”
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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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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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The Third Story
by Rebecca Wurtz. “Paul once thought that the talent and ambition that had propelled him into graduate school as the first Negro PhD in pharmacology would keep propelling him, perhaps into a chairmanship at a prestigious Negro university. But life and history took over…”
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Sibilance
by Leonard Post. “‘Kill me,’ he pleaded, not exactly in those words, but clothed rather in the language of assisted suicide. He had no right to ask that of me.”
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At the Mercy Meal
by Lindsay Starck. “If this scene—these baskets of bread, this mediocre rice, that parking lot awash with light—is familiar to me from all the other funerals we’ve attended here, how much more familiar is it to him? He drags his fork across his plate and the room seems to collapse.”
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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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Conduit
by River Adams. “This is a temple for them, I thought. This is where the gods will be merciful or not. And I speak for the gods.”
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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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A Nigerian Attempts Therapy
by Ucheoma Onwutuebe. “I am a Nigerian woman, plagued by Nigerian womanly problems. When I moved to America for graduate school last summer, I believed this new country would shield me from those nagging afflictions.”
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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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A Pure and Lovely Flame
by Sandy Woodson. “For Descartes, the pineal gland is a magical place where our souls and personality and identity shimmer in a night sky.”
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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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Carrying History
Sahar Delijani. “I am a child of the Iranian revolution. In 1983, my mother gave birth to me in Evin Prison, one of Iran’s most notorious jails.”
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Distance
by Mallika Sekhar. “The ward doctor rang me late in the night to say that the Judge had been admitted with COVID-19 and was not doing well. He wasn’t deemed fit for ICU because of his age and his prior illness, the blood cancer for which my team had been treating him for many years.”
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Brighter When Wet
by Kai Coggin. “I remove the day, strip myself / of the expectations and the pain, / the way my soul strives and my flesh endures…”
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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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Autumn Dawn, After Fog
by Patty Crane. “the fields to silver, mown paths / like rivers of first-ice—every / blade of grass scattering light…”
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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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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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My Friend Paul Says
by Dominika Bednarska. “if I slurred my speech, if I stuttered, / if I could not swallow, which variable / would make me less worthy of living?”
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In the Hospital
by David Lehman. “In the hospital there was time / to read to dream to act / to read Freud’s dream book on his couch / and how his best thoughts came to him / in the hospital during / World War I for example…”
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by L Annette Binder. “The lilacs were blooming when you took your bike, / the air fragrant as a funeral parlor when you rode / to the river…”
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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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“Never Send…”
by Vincent Casaregola. “Having left work early this spring / afternoon, I feel no rush / to be anywhere but here and now, / even waiting at this reluctant light…”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—is "Reading the Body," a theme issue on the body & how it speaks to us. (It was also the first issue of BLR to be published independently!) Read 3 issue highlights & more in our weekly post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-39-highlights
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A hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published her second most famous essay, “On Being Ill.” Written during a prolonged bout of illness the previous fall, Woolf asked why sickness—an unavoidable feature of human experience—is represented so rarely and inadequately in literature.
BLR's 25th Anniversary Issue is here! 🎉 And to celebrate it, we're welcoming authors from the issue for a live reading. 📖
Join us online on Thurs, 10/22, for an evening of new poems, stories, & essays, plus the joy of community & connection.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bellevueliteraryreview/2437613
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—revisits past BLR Prizewinners, with more to explore in our weekly blog post. Plus, the colorful WWII-inspired cover has a story of its own. 🎨 https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-38-highlights
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