2023 BLR Literary Prizes
Entries for the 2023 BLR Literary Prizes are now open! Submit your best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2022.
The BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. For each category, first prize is $1000 and honorable mention is $250. Winners are published in the spring 2023 issue of BLR.
Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
Click here to see the 2022 BLR Literary Prize Winners. You’ll get to read their work in Issue 42…coming this spring!
Nonfiction Judge: Rana Awdish is the author of the critically-acclaimed, best-selling memoir, In Shock, based on her own critical illness. She has been interviewed by The Times, The Telegraph, NPR, The BBC, and the Today Show online, and lectures nationally about compassionate care. She is the Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and a practicing Critical Care Physician. She also serves as the Medical Director of Care Experience for the Henry Ford Health System.
Fiction Judge: Toni Jensen is the author of Carry, a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous women’s lives (Ballantine, 2020). An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen’s essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She is also the author of the short story collection From the Hilltop. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Métis.
Poetry Judge: Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny (Penguin Random House, 2021), Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), and the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). Williams’s work appears in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is a winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. Williams serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.
