A journal of humanity and human experience

Coming up next

Contest and general submissions are OPEN. Submit to the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes by July 1, 2025.
Join us June 11th for a BLR BookTalk with renowned writer Pria Anand on her book, The Mind Electric. (Free, online)

As featured on NPR's Morning Edition

NPR’s Neda Ulaby reported on BLR‘s 20th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri, along with author Celeste Ng. Long before Celeste Ng reached stratospheric popularity with Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, she was an emerging author, whose story “Girls, at Play” appeared in BLR and then won a Pushcart Prize.

Whiting Award Winner

BLR was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize for
“excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community.”

BLR Off the Page

DISCOVER MORE

Baptism

by Michele Bombardier.
“I pull up a chair, lower the bedrails. / He bats at my hand. When he finds it, he quiets, / his hand a vice on mine.”

Ash

by Karin Gottshall.
“The river has its own concerns. It loves / the human form the way fury / loves a stone.”

Epileptic

by Mary Morris.
“Within the body—/ a ghost // Ground unfastened / Contradicted space…”

Relic

by Stacy Nigliazzo.
“Quietly, they concede, /
leaving pennies / at your feet.”

Coulrophobia

by Jacob M. Appel.
“My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord—he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even a college girl who “had law school written all over her”—but he probably bit off too much when he sublet to the mime.”

The Tag

by Elizabeth Crowell.
“Dr. H’s earnestness was more apparent the second time we met with him, when we weren’t hearing the bad news for the first time. In a full-lit room not dimmed for ultrasounds, he was a handsome, dark-haired man, a decade younger than Cheryl and I.”

Biding

by June Rowe.
“Named Inky by his captors, with appealing / comparisons to human traits, feedings / timed to please the children’s flattened / faces squished against the glass….”

Day 1,301

by Judith Harris.
“There will be a worse day. He will live / long enough to not recognize me at all, / and I sense it drawing nearer…”

This Be Madness

by Carter Sickels.
“We were out of heroin and broke. Didn’t have pills. Nothing to drink or huff. “I’ve got a plan,’ I said.”

Praise & Recognition