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— Everything BLR. —
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 38 highlights
World War II-inspired cover art, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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Bellevue Literary Review: 2026 Fall Reading
Join us on October 22 to celebrate the launch of BLR’s special 25th anniversary issue; hear from the issue’s contributors live as they read from their work.
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Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 37 highlights
Exploring a good life, plus much more as we continue to share issue highlights throughout our 25th anniversary year.
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BLR 25th anniversary ~~ Issue 36 highlights
Literature as refuge, 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 workshop.
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Coming soon! BLR’s 25th anniversary issue
Along with a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the anniversary issue of BLR includes special features including an art insert and roundtable about writing and healing.
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Interview: Tammy Greenwood
“Nature has a way of reminding us we don’t have to try so hard; sometimes just existing is magnificent.”
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Remembering September 11th
2026 marks 25 years since the devastating 9/11 attacks. Even after all these years, it still feels impossible to wrap one’s mind around the enormity and barbarity of that day…
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— See what’s new with us at BLR. —
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Call for Submissions: Theme Issue on Migrations
From September 1 to December 31, 2026, we are accepting submissions for a special theme issue on Migrations.
-
Coming soon! BLR’s 25th anniversary issue
Along with a stellar mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the anniversary issue of BLR includes special features including an art insert and roundtable about writing and healing.
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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.
— 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: Tammy Greenwood
“Nature has a way of reminding us we don’t have to try so hard; sometimes just existing is magnificent.”
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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.”
— A new set of great reads with each click. Refresh for more. —
- fiction
- nonfiction
- poetry
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Rocket
by Jason Baum. “He asks if he can put the radio to a country station…the guy is going into space for a year so I let him. Who knows what kind of reception he’ll be able to get up there.”
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In Other Hemispheres
by Pamela Ryder. “The room was dark, the father says. Then darker. It happened so quickly, I couldn’t call out. I thought I smelled grain—wheat or oats—what horses eat. A clean, sweet smell.”
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il Faut
by Stephanie Hammer. “Now he stares at the bag of bulbs, the naked little bodies burgeoning, begging for life in the sweet dark ground. The ground that buries.”
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Last Stop
by Daniel Pope. “Outside the train station a man lies on the concrete brick walkway, his head resting in a pool of blood. His skull is buzzed and the blood leaks brightly out of a wound above his left temple. Just beyond the pool is his camouflage-patterned cap.”
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Winston Speaks
by Jill Caputo. “Winston sold candy at the bus station on Wednesdays because that was the only day Georgia could give him a ride there. He kept the goods in the pack on the back of his chair: Snickers, Milky Ways, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, both peanut and plain…”
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Numbers
by Marcia Calhoun Forecki. “Even numbers are smooth and sweet, and can all be divided by two, which is the most perfect number of all because two means love: husband and wife, mother and child, man and dog. That should be obvious to anyone.”
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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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The Veil Thins
by Fiona Ennis. “She was being tugged somewhere unearthly, towards a radiant light source, the same colour as those long fluorescent white lights that buzzed in the kitchen in the convent.”
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We the Mothers
by Kathi Hansen. “We’re not saying our boys are angels, … we’re just saying that we the mothers didn’t need to teach our boys not to rape.”
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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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Of Mothers and Monkeys
by Caitlin Kuehn. “My medical knowledge is limited to what I have learned here at the lab. All of it applicable only to non-human mammals.”
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Going South
by Natalie Pearson. “I make amends with small gifts—a loaf of crusty bread, a Louie Prima CD, lilacs in a mason jar. This little drive to nowhere would be just such a gift.”
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Drawing Blood
by Laura Johnsrude. “I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it.”
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Claiming Missing Inheritance
by Jack Lancaster. “At the Whitney Museum, David Wojnarowicz’s portrait of his friend Peter Hujar claims its own wall. Ten feet back, I twist from parallel to perpendicular, unexpectedly lingering instead of walking by.”
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Sisters
by Sheila Kohler. “For a moment my sister seemed to hesitate, standing in the ghostly light of the moon, as though she were considering going back.”
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Visual Anguish and Looking at Art
by Sheila Kohler. “I understand these were commercial jetliners, not ICBMs, that split the steel and glass of the World Trade Center. Someone, a person, had a long-standing vision, intentions, imagined the explosions and death that would follow.”
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Semantics
by Rachel Hall. “We tell our kids to give it their best shot before their big exams—calculus, say, or French—or before the championship game on a crisp autumn night, the stands filled with fans in the school colors, the stadium lights bright.”
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Mental Health Days
by Sakena Jwan Washington. “With practiced pain, I delivered an Oscar-worthy performance of smiles and congratulations, and then escaped to the bathroom and sobbed until my eyes were bloodshot.”
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No One Thing
by Laura LeMoon. “The things I’ve had to do to survive were part of the price I paid to be seen…Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.”
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Vital Signs
by Rachel Mann. “One thing you will feel, as fiercely as the contractions squeezing you now like a juicer, is that it will always be a different kind of loss for him.”
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EVOCATION (STREETS)
by Jeanette Clough. “I am surrounded by streets / half dark, half lit, by high rises / sheathed in metal and glass…”
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A Spring Without Us
by Talia Bloch. “The playground has been locked for months. / A swing coughs dryly in the shade.”
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Lost Time (1997)
by Jay Kidd. “It was on an airplane that I let my / mother read the first paragraph of / Swann’s Way, my travel reading.”
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After Lightning, I Dream of Abrigette
by Aracelis Girmay. “Abrigette, evenings you are my head. / I think of you at night & then in sleep, bricks / of your house stacked neatly, your dogs & your cats, / & I wonder if you are one hundred now…”
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REASONS FOR ADMISSION (NOT INDEXED IN ICD-10)
by Gaetan Sgro. “The need to catch up on sleep. An ache to sleep on clean sheets. The prospect of waking up dry.”
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Bellevue
by Julia Alvarez. “My mother used to say that she’d end up / at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.”
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Shroud
by Ted Morrissey. “Your left-behind clothes still occupy closets and / clotheslines in the basement. She refuses to / donate them away, / insisting that family may want / them (implying should want them).”
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Uremia
by Margaret Kogan. “The smell is like nothing else. / Sickeningly sweet and kind of smoky, / like something burning and rotting at the same time, / it filled my father’s hospital room / and stuck to our clothes and nostrils / long after he died.”
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Gone
by Carolyn Welch Scarbrough. “William’s letter uses suicided as a verb / and really why not? The finite action // verb—without an introduction, unreduced by / other verbs, other introductory phrases…”
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Ambiguous Loss
by Ceilidh Barlow Cash. “It feels like holding a bird in one hand / and a bowling ball in the other.”
This week's featured issue—part of our 25th anniversary lookback—revisits past BLR Prizewinners, with more to explore in our weekly blog post. Plus, the colorful WWII-inspired cover has a story of its own. 🎨 https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-38-highlights
4It's an exciting time to be part of the BLR community, with new releases & milestones from our authors. 🎉 A few highlights are shown here, plus there’s even more in our recent roundup: https://tinyurl.com/blrauthornews
4This week's ft. issue—part of our 25th anniv lookback—is entitled "A Good Life" & showcases poetry & prose that looks deeply at the joys & complications of our individual worlds. Read three issue highlights, with more to explore in our weekly blog post: https://blreview.org/issue-highlights/issue-37-highlights
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