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

A Doctor in the Court of the King of Nepal

by Itzhak Kronzon.
“I labored to decipher the pidgin English until I at last understood that the King of Nepal wanted me, Dr. Itzhak Kronzon of the Bronx Municipal Hospital, to come to his royal court.”

Duende

by Elizabeth J. Coleman.
“If I were a musical instrument, I’d be / a guitar, or violin, one that cries out, / the way the clarinet belted out / Smile When Your Heart is Breaking…”

Ghosts of Doubt

by Gregg Cusick.
“He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty-
something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to
the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters right, a quarter left. The book would lay open on page 63, just as it does on the podium.”

Toast

by Michael Montlack.
“Once a woman who lost her mother / told me the story of a guru rushing / to satisfy his dying mentor’s last wish.”

Book Review: Where is the Mercy?

Map of Hope and Sorrow documents our spectacular inadequacy when facing the suffering of our own and in upholding the rights of all.

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?”

Beenie at Fourteen

by Margaret Buckhanon.
“While I wait for him to pull the trigger, I drive to the grocery store. Pick up milk, chewing gum, sponges. Drop off the dry cleaning: the dress I splattered with a spaghetti stain at Shana and Calvin’s wedding last month. Ignore the stench of the rotting plant in the backseat and keep the AC rippling.”

Fertile

by Kai Coggin.
“make a whole ecosystem under my touch / huddle the howling fox the heavy elephant…”

Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War

by Diane Cameron.
“In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living room, both perforated with bullets.”

Praise & Recognition