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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 25 highlights
Literature and the multicultural perspective, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Editor Danielle Ofri on “Why Medicine Needs Literary Magazines”
“Maybe a literary journal is not so much pages bound onto a spine, but rather a community of people—writers, readers, listeners, thinkers—who find solace in the comforts and confrontations of the written word.”
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Angela Tang-Tan Wins Pushcart Prize for “Two Thoracotomies”
BLR is thrilled to announce that “Two Thoracotomies” by Angela Tang-Tan has won a Pushcart Prize.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 24 highlights
At the eye of the storm, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Celebration of Poetry and Healing
BLR is thrilled to be part of the 2026 poetry series at Bryant Park’s Reading Room. All are welcome — mark your calendar for September 1!
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 23 highlights
Meditations on family and fragility, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Creativity in Medicine: Navigating Uncertainty through Art and Literature
Explore how poetry, stories, and visual art can help us make sense of medicine’s complexities in this new online class.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 22 highlights
A short history of nursing, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR featured on PBS News Hour’s CANVAS Series
Watch PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown report on BLR’s 25th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri and BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 25 highlights
Literature and the multicultural perspective, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
Angela Tang-Tan Wins Pushcart Prize for “Two Thoracotomies”
BLR is thrilled to announce that “Two Thoracotomies” by Angela Tang-Tan has won a Pushcart Prize.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 24 highlights
At the eye of the storm, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 23 highlights
Meditations on family and fragility, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
-
BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 22 highlights
A short history of nursing, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 21 highlights
A look back to our 10th anniversary, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 20 highlights
A special dedication, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 19 highlights
Early writing from two best-selling authors in the BLR community, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 18 highlights
The stories that stay with us, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR Spring Reading with Authors from Issue 50
Join us on May 28 to celebrate the launch of Issue 50. We’ll hear from the issue’s authors live as they share their stories, essays, and poems.
— Come join us, online, or in person. —
UPCOMING EVENTS
WATCH OUR PAST EVENTS
BLR Spring Reading 2026
BLR‘s annual spring reading features stunning poems, stories, and essays, including the winners of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes. Hear from the issue’s contributors live as they read from their work. Hosted by BLR editors Saleem Hue Penny and Danielle Ofri
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Mapping the Mind
Mapping the Mind — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — is a dynamic conversation about writing the inner life. With Susannah Cahalan, Damon Tweedy, Sarah LaBrie, and Danielle Ofri
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Writing the Body
Writing the Body — part of BLR’s Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare series — brings together four best-selling authors whose work confronts illness as it is lived in the body. With Porochista Khakpour, Meghan O’Rourke, Rebekah Taussig, and Danielle Ofri
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BLR Fall Reading: Animalia
Watch writers and poets read their works from BLR‘s Issue 49, ‘Animalia,’ as part of BLR‘s live, online fall reading.
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BLR Book Salon with Anne Fadiman
Watch our exclusive BLR Book Salon with renowned writer Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
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BLR SPRING READING 2025: WINNING WORDS
Watch a celebration of BLR‘s 48th issue and the winners of the 2025 BLR literary prizes. Featuring exciting new works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus interviews with our prizewinners.
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BLR BookTalk with Venita Blackburn
Watch acclaimed writer Venita Blackburn and BLR editor Suzanne McConnell’s conversation on Venita’s award-winning debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California.
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BLR Writing Webinar: The Book Doctors Are In!
Watch medical writers Danielle Ofri, Damon Tweedy, Esther Choo, and Perri Klass discuss writing, careers, and ethical dilemmas as part of our workshop series.
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Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader
Watch Narrative Arc: The Journey from Writer to Reader, celebrating the unique relationship between the writers who bring words to the page and the readers who receive them.
— Read interviews with BLR authors, editors, readers, and more. —
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Interview: Lara Palmqvist
“The very idea that no story is final—be it the story of one’s own self, or the story of a nation—is ultimately something in which I find great hope.”
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Interview: Sabah Parsa
“Humor is the easiest for me to write in any piece, fiction or nonfiction.”
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Interview: Jack Coulehan
“Clinical care provides the subject matter for many of my poems, and some of the themes I explore in them…have driven a process of self-discovery that I think has made me a better doctor.”
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Interview: Meredith Talusan
Fiction allows me to further portray realities from perspectives outside the majority, not just at the level of my lived experience but in terms of a broad range of possible trans, BIPOC, immigrant, and disabled experiences.
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Interview: Manini Nayar
I rarely know how a story ends until I get there. A story has its own life, and I am immersed in it and on the margins at the same time, both participant and recorder.
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20th Anniversary Editorial Roundtable
In honor of BLR’s 20th anniversary, we’ve invited editors past and present to offer reflections on the BLR’s founding and its evolution over two decades of publishing.
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Interview: Julia Levine
I have loved the natural world since I was a small child and it is my inability to see it accurately that pains me.
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Interview: Nina Adel
Almost all of my work takes place in the realm of the hybrid… I myself am just a regular person and artist who finds rules very difficult to adhere to.
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Interview: Yalitza Ferreras
English has now become my primary language, although I experience it as a syllabic language, which I attribute to my brain being wired for Spanish.
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
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fiction
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nonfiction
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poetry
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Cousin Esther Goes to Chicago
by Cori Baill. “All that time I’ve been working here, mopping the floors, emptying the trash, washing down rooms, and watching the wet-behind-the-ears young pup doctors learn their business.”
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Vultur Gryphus
by Daniel Seifert. “Luis unscrews a small bottle of puro and daubs Tio’s smiling mouth. In the still air, the pure alcohol makes Luis’s eyes water. Further down, he hears the deep-throated cough of a detonation. He heads toward it.”
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Still Life
by Marpessa Dawn Outlaw. “From the moment my friend George stepped from his loft to his death at the bottom of the building’s elevator shaft, there’s been one thing I can say I’ve known for sure—that love is dangerously overrated.”
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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.”
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Examining Rooms
by Midge Raymond. “These future doctors need to make a personal connection, to take the time to discuss next steps, to listen . . . Expressing the symptoms of pain is one thing—judging people on their performances is another.”
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To The River
by Kelly Flanigan. “I walk into Scott’s kitchen, sweaty from basketball and needing something cold to drink, and there’s his mom in just her underwear…”
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Leviathan
by Jennifer Lee. “At what point, I wonder, does a person say enough is enough? I can’t go through with this; I didn’t pick the ending I’ve been given. I would dearly love to keep the next few years of my life.”
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Eruv
by David Milofsky. “Dotty Adams remarked that she hadn’t known there were any Jews in the neighborhood. Some people wondered if the men in long black coats and broad-brimmed hats were Goths, like those boys at Columbine.”
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The Crazy One
by Hadley Leggett. “But here I am, and here you are, and once you’ve heard the whole story, it’s your job to decide: Am I the crazy one, or is it all of you?”
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Finding Honey
by Daniel Reiss. “To find honey, I must first find a bee. It’s not that hard to find a bee. I just wander the woods till I find a source of water. If I come to a creek or a river, I’ll nearly always find bees…”
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The Night of the Hurricane
“Hurricanes are not a common occurrence in New York City, but on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall with extraordinary force.”
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Calling Card
by Mary Luce. “It was a chilly November afternoon in a southern town so small it never made it to a map. I was in the bedroom typing when I heard the noise and then my mother’s scream. She somehow appeared at the door with her hand over her bloody abdomen and whispered, “Get the…
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In My Head
by Avra Aron. “You are twelve years old and your mind is like a game of hot potato. Your thoughts are quick and jerky, and you need to get past them before you get burned.”
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Dispatch From Bewilderness
by Judith Hannah Weiss. “Probes puncture my scalp, surveying my mind. Temporal lobe, occipital lobe, you name it; there’s a probe for the lobe.”
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Call/Waiting
by Alexa Rose Steinberg. “Throughout the evening, I hear explanations of why people can’t talk when I call…”
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Our Eyes Were Watching Marcia
by Samuel A. Autman. “Television had always been a perfect distraction from our family’s drama and trauma, soothing us more than our Baptist faith.”
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A Figment of Your Imagination
by Cynthia-Marie O’Brien. “I am a figment of your imagination. You may laugh skeptically, and I admit there is much that would seem to prove I am anything but…”
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Two Thoracotomies
by Angela Tang-Tan. “The first time I witness a thorax opened, it is on a twenty-five-gram mouse. Heavier than most because she is gravid. The second time, it’s on a thirty-year-old man.”
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Harvest Moon
by Julia Michie Bruckner. “He’d looked perfect – nothing deformed or discolored, no hair out of place, both shoelaces tied. The life had been shaken out of him.”
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The Color of Sound
by Judy Rowley. “Almost every night throughout my childhood I prayed that a miracle would occur, that I would be able to hear perfectly one day.”
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The Bottom Drawer
by Amanda Auchter. “Tucked beneath my mother’s shirts / and camisoles, a paper bag / of prayer cards, I find…”
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She Misses and Wishes We Could All Live Together
by Muriel Nelson. “We lean close to admire the web / then blow on it // gently.”
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Letter from a Code Talker, 1945
by Sean Sam. “The commanders wish me to say / the language beaten from me. / Each time I speak another sun / drops from the abnormal sky.”
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Conversation with a Dead Poet
by Eleonora Luongo. “I kept them all. The poems, I mean. When I / tried to tell your mother, she’d leaned in, said,…”
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A THREAD OF SUNLIGHT ON EURYDICE’S HEM
by Eric Pankey. “Call it an exercise in restraint / The angle of ascent is sharp / Like the sloped ceiling…”
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Phosphorescence
by Zhu Jian. “Passing by the burial ground, / I see some flickers of light. / A friend tells me / it’s the bones that flash.”
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Dementia Unit for John Glenn
by Amy Rothschild. “You toss a pale bagel onto his plate, / do some hand-waving around / the problem of gravity.”
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The Practice of Cleaning
by Sarah Nance. “My mother knows there are three / ways to be clean: to take a mess / that’s there and cover it…”
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Lithium and the Absence of Desire
by Virginia Chase Sutton. “It is not advertised on the pill bottle, merely mentioned / in the product description from the drug store. / You have no idea what you are giving away.”
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Monodrama
by Rachel Hadas. “The asymmetrically lurching gait, / the austere paradox as of one hand clapping: / a unilateral dialogue.”
Writers!⌛️Submit by end of day *tomorrow, July 1* for general submissions and the 2027 BLR Prizes. We can't wait to read your work!
#poetry #fiction #nonfiction #writing
Get those final edits done! 📢 Both general & contest submissions will be closing July 1. Submit your poetry, fiction, nonfiction on health, illness, & healing.
This year's contest judges are the remarkable Natalie Diaz, Daniel Mason, & Meghan O'Rourke.
https://blreview.org/submit/
🎉 BLR is thrilled to announce that “Two Thoracotomies” by Angela Tang-Tan has won a @PushcartPrize! Angela’s essay—from BLR Issue 49, our "Animalia" issue—parallels her experience in a research lab with a devastating overnight shift in the emergency room. https://blreview.org/news/recent-news/angela-tang-tan-wins-pushcart-prize-for-two-thoracotomies/
"Running a literary magazine was not in my academic game plan...." In a new article from @TheLancet, our editor @danielleofri shares how a kernel of an idea about the importance of patient stories turned into a literary publication 25 years ago 📖🩺
https://danielleofri.com/why-medicine-needs-literary-magazines/
Life has its storms—in some cases, literally. 💦 This week's featured issue of BLR was published in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and includes a series of recollections from frontline medical residents, plus a mix of poetry, fiction, & nonfiction. https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-24-highlights
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