BLR seeks high-caliber, unpublished work, broadly and creatively related to our themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.
BLR pays $75 for poetry and $150 for prose. Published authors will receive two copies of the issue in which their work appears, plus an additional 1-year subscription to BLR. There is an author discount for purchasing extra copies.
Fiction: We seek character-driven fiction with original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror). We have only occasionally published flash fiction. While we are always interested in creative explorations in style, we do lean toward classic short stories.
Nonfiction: We are looking for essays that reach beyond the standard ‘illness narrative’ to develop a topic in an engaging and original manner. Incorporate thoughtful and creative analysis that allows anecdotes to serve a larger purpose. (Please, no academic discourses or works with footnotes. )
Poetry: We encourage poems that are accessible to a wide audience. Characteristics we look for are vivid writing, strong narrative, and rendering the familiar new. We encourage you to peruse back issues in our archive to get a sense of our ethos.
About the Journal
Bellevue Literary Review is an award-winning independent literary journal that probes the nuances of our lives in illness and in health. BLR publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that brings together the perspectives of patients, caregivers, family members, students, healthcare professionals, and the general public. BLR is committed to seeking a diversity of voices from all communities and all walks of life.
The first literary journal to arise from a medical setting, BLR has published two print volumes of literature annually since 2001. As a literary arts organization, BLR offers a wide range of events at the intersection of the arts and the sciences. BLR maintains an active online and social media presence, and engages its community of readers and writers by offering public events, newsletters, reading guides, book reviews, literary contests, author interviews, roundtable discussions, and accessible digital content.