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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 31 highlights
The art of memory, 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 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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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 30 highlights
A chapter closes on BLR’s archival cover photos, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Art and Medicine: Supporting Compassion Through Creativity
Enjoy cocktails, conversation, and community, while supporting BLR’s Art in Medicine program.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 29 highlights
Reflections on the cost of war, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 28 highlights
A literary trip across the world, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 27 highlights
An exploration of our environment’s fragile nature, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 26 highlights
The circus comes to Bellevue, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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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 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.
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Announcing the BLR Book Club pick
We’re excited to announce our first pick for the BLR Book Club: Fire Exit, a novel by Morgan Talty. Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, and Harper’s Bazaar, Fire Exit is available on BLR’s Bookshop page, where a portion of every purchase goes to support community-building and…
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Announcing the 2027 BLR Literary Prizes Judges
Meet our 2027 BLR Literary Prize judges: Natalie Diaz, Daniel Mason, and Meghan O’Rourke. Submit poetry, fiction and nonfiction from March 1 to July 1, 2026.
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Writing the Body: Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare
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.
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BLR & Writers Read Present Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery
Watch “Body Language: True Stories of Illness, Recovery, and Discovery” hosted by City Winery, Writers Read & Bellevue Literary Review.
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2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees.
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Announcing the 2026 BLR Prizewinners
Meet the Winners and Honorable Mentions of the 2026 BLR Literary Prizes.
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Be part of the “Narrative Arc”: Tell us about your favorite BLR poem, story, or essay
One of the ways we’ll be celebrating BLR’s 25th anniversary is with a new Narrative Arc event… which means another opportunity to share your voice with our community!
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Fall Reading: Animalia LIVE!
Watch the launch celebration of BLR’s special issue, “Animalia,” featuring writing that explores how health and healing both transcend and interconnect species, and what this can teach us about being human.
— 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: Laura E. Garrard
“I found capturing moments through poetry, rather than summarizing the entire cancer experience, to be therapeutic rather than draining.”
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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. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Mud
by Ben Orlando. “I saw the man before he died, under the front tire of my father’s truck. He was pinned and the truck stalled and then settled in the mud and three grown men were not enough to push the truck forward or backward to stop the man’s pain. I was not a grown…
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The Hardest Parts
by Fernando Álvarez-Perez. “Victor has evaded physical activity with crafty excuses his whole life, but he decides that boxing could be an acceptable diversion. He doesn’t have to hit anyone. There’s something thrilling about hammering away at the heavy bag in a hot warehouse under industrial fans, the contented exhaustion after.”
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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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Translation Memory
by Midge Raymond. “For days he came home to find her in the same spot, staring at an empty street. When she turned to him, her eyes looked like thin wet glass, as if the slightest sound could shatter them.”
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Shaking the Dead Geranium
by Harriet Rzetelny. “By age sixteen, he’d won a full scholarship to Emory College. By eighteen, he was convinced that my mother was sucking the life fluids out of his brain and went after her with a bread knife.”
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His Own Time
by John Thompson. “I did a little time once. It wasn’t a long bit, but that doesn’t matter much. Time is time.”
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The Gift of the Spanish Lady
by Marcia Calhoun Forecki. “The last words Mrs. Sommers said to her husband were: ‘And don’t let that girl have the run of the house.’”
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The Sounds of Jilotzingo
by Mehr-Afarin Kohan. “Now her praying to the clouds sounded stupid because I was old enough to know that nothing and no one would ever be descending. And old enough to know, something had broken in my mother’s backbone forever.”
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Home Depot
by Robert Oldshue. “You know how it is. You think you’re married, you’re married to Albie forty-two, what is it, forty-three years, so at least you know Albie. Right?”
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An Infinite Hunger
by Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka. “You eat more and more, until you feel sick. Your mom says people are souls, but not you. You’re an empty body, filling up and up and up to make the emptiness go away.”
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71 Grams
by Nicki Porter. “At home, you unload each item with a quiet smile and feel a pinching like a tiny crab below your belly. You imagine a poppy seed nestling in, burrowing, seeking shelter within you, preparing to stay.”
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Radon Gas and the Believers
by Andrew C. Gottlieb. “But its impossible to go very far without seeing a sudden dark opening, the sloping, rotting framing of an abandoned mine entrance, or the colorful, dangerous scree sloping downhill: the remnant tailings from the ore processing that once happened here, spilling from a now filled-in shaft that one hundred years ago…
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Hal-9000, Bach, and the Personal Physics of Going Deaf
by Laura Hope-Gill. “There is no sound in space. Beyond our noisy atmosphere stretches an infinite quiet.”
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Canine Cardiology
by Deborah Thompson. “Houdi pawed at the student’s thighs and, despite his heart condition, displayed one of his inopportune erections, which the vet student chose not to acknowledge.”
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The Only Fat Man in Lascahobas
by Evan Lyon. “Georges, the owner of St. Gabriel’s Funeral Enterprise, is the only fat man in Lascahobas.”
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Breaking Point
by Eileen Cronin. “Our heads are filled with the native rhythm of an aerobic beat and hot anticipation.”
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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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Snapshots of Bellevue
by Karen Lamberton. “The ‘General Slocum,’ was the biggest and fastest harbor day-liner. That day, about 2,000 passengers, embarked for an annual Sunday School excursion.”
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Lost Vessels
by Jehanne Dubrow. “Memory is not kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing damaged ceramics with a mixture of lacquer and powdered gold. There are ugly seams. There is no glittering dust poured into the fractures between sentences.”
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By My Own Hand
by Anita Darcel Taylor. “Mental anguish can be as unruly as any terminal illness. It can, unfortunately, orchestrate its own end.”
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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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Out Back, Behind the Hospital
Steve Cushman. “We shared cigarettes and jokes / talked about anything except / what we’d seen, the baby we’d X-rayed, / his bruises…”
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The Shed
by Elana Bell. “Each time something went missing— / the photo album of my first / year, postcard from a forgotten friend…”
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Yellowthroat
by Eileen Elizabeth Waggoner. “Some of y’all pray to God / I pray to the yellow warblers / and their frail whistling / on wildfire winds…”
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Printouts
by Dylan Landis. “Janet reported that gray taffeta / curtained her walls. It was delicate. When touched, the ashen silk dissolved / around her thumbprint….”
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Mood Swings
by Erica Funkhouser. “Sadness calls for inadequate outerwear. / Exhilaration for ultra violet. / All feelings are unhealthy.”
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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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Her Marked Black Body
by Cynthia Parker-Ohene. “The macabre moon / Once lunged at me / It hisses red / Hangs voyeuristically / Wants me to stand in its balkanized light.”
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When Fire Arrives
by Sharon Pretti. “It’s all wrong, today’s sun, / a welt in the fire-smoke sky.”
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“Never Send…”
by Vincent Casaregola. “Having left work early this spring / afternoon, I feel no rush / to be anywhere but here and now, / even waiting at this reluctant light…”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—focuses on the art of memory, with stories, essays & poems that dive into this timeless theme. Read three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-31-highlights
4Though we're not ready to let summer go just yet, we are looking ahead to September � and the incredible slate of creative & community-focused events BLR has coming up. We hope you'll be inspired to join us! Learn more: https://blreview.org/blog/#events
3This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—closes a chapter on BLR's archival cover photos, plus includes a tribute to Oliver Sacks, noted author, physician, and longtime BLR friend. Read issue highlights, plus more: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-30-highlights/
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Day 2 of #thesealeychallenge • Our featured poet is Jayne Marek, whose work appeared in Bellevue Literary Review (@BLReview), Issue 49. For the whole month of August, we'd like to put a spotlight on individual poets as well as some of our favourite lit mags.