2024 BLR Literary Prizes
Entries for the 2024 BLR Literary Prizes are now open! Submit your best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from March 1 to July 5, 2023.
The BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. For each category, first prize is $1,000 and honorable mention is $300. Winners are published in the spring 2024 issue of BLR.
Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
Click here to see the 2023 BLR Literary Prize Winners, and read their work in Issue 44.
Nonfiction Judge: Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. Their words have appeared in Poets & Writers, Catapult, Lithub, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere online and in print. Their memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times. edgargomez.net
Fiction Judge: Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the young adult novel Finding my Voice. She is one of a handful of American journalists granted a visa to North Korea and was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing. Lee has received an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian. Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family. marielee.net
Poetry Judge: Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a Guatelombian (Guatemalan-Colombian) American poet and screenwriter living in Brooklyn by way of Massachusetts. She is the author of peluda, which explores the intersections of Latina identity, feminism, hair removal, and what it means to belong, and Dreaming of You, about bringing Selena back to life through a seance and the disastrous consequences that follow. She is working on adapting Dreaming of You into a film. Her next novel Candelaria (Fall 2023, Astra House) is about an abuela at the end of the world, and how her granddaughters started it. She is the co-host of the podcast Say More with Olivia Gatwood. www.melissalozadaoliva.com
