A journal of humanity and human experience

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We are currently seeking applicants for the positions of Poetry Editor and Nonfiction Editor.
Subscribe now to and get our latest themed issue on Taking Care.
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 BLR Literary Prizes! 

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

Off The Page: I’m Not Talking to Anybody

Perri Klass reads her essay “I’m Not Talking to Anybody”

Particle

like light is/
like my speckled skin: brim/
and brink. verge.

“Silence = Death”  

His worn-out T-shirt, black as mourning, black / as countless deaths, surprises me

Crosscurrents

Whenever you don’t want to be who you are, you call yourself Margaret Jefferson. And that’s who you are now, or who you are when you’re not yourself, walking into the conference room of an accounting firm in a random midtown Manhattan building for an open writers’ meetup in the fall of 2017.

Battenkill

People need the company of other people. It’s how people are made. They can’t help it. This need can be degrading to a person’s soul, if souls are real.

School Shooting

After today’s rain/
all that’s left/
of the planets/
green and pink

Word

The high sweep of waves, like the bulging arc
of a grand piano, and the silence of deer in a field of
lupine and trefoil, and the underthrum

Scott Oglesby’s Picks

Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Off The Page: Tattoos

Galen Schram reads from his prize-wining story, “Tattoos” from BLR Issue 40.

Praise & Recognition