General Submissions

Guidelines:

• BLR seeks high-caliber, unpublished fiction, nonfiction, and essays broadly and creatively related to our themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.
• Fiction / nonfiction maximum word count is 5,000. You may submit up to 3 poems in one poetry submission. Please see below for additional genre-specific guidelines.
• We happily consider simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• Manuscripts can only be accepted electronically via Submittable. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, please reach out to info@blreview.org.
• There is a $5 fee per general submission, which is waived for current subscribers. (If you are not a current subscriber, you can subscribe using this link when you submit your work and take advantage of free submission.) These fees help BLR fund publication of the journal, but please contact us at info@blreview.org if you are experiencing financial hardship.
• We strive to provide several reviewers for each manuscript and kindly ask your patience in this necessarily slow process. If you have not heard from us within five months, feel free to inquire about your manuscript.
• Authors receive $75 for poetry and $150 for prose upon publication, plus two copies of the issue in which their work appears and an additional 1-year subscription to BLR. There is also an author discount for purchasing extra copies of the issue containing their work.
• Work previously published in print or electronically will not be considered. For BLR, “published work” means published in print in North America, or published on the Internet in electronic journals, e-zines, academic websites, and other “public” or “official” websites. Works posted on personal blogs or websites will be considered on a case-by-case basis. We ask that authors be honest about web postings. (If a work is discovered to have been posted or published elsewhere—and not openly acknowledged by the author in advance—we will remove it from consideration.
• By submitting, authors affirm that the work being submitted is their own original writing, has not been previously published, and was not created or materially shaped by generative artificial intelligence tools.
• BLR acquires First North American rights, and the right to reprint in anthologies and online. After publication, all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to BLR is made.

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Additional guidelines by genre:

FICTION: Bellevue Literary Review seeks character-driven fiction with original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror). Most of our published stories tend to be in the range of 2,000-4,000 words. We have only occasionally published flash fiction. While we are always interested in creative explorations in style, we do lean toward classic short stories. (Maximum word count: 5,000)

NONFICTION: We are looking for essays that reach beyond the standard ‘illness narrative’ to develop a topic in an engaging and original manner. Incorporate anecdotes that There is also an author discount for purchasing extra copies of the issue cotaining their work.erve a larger purpose. Please note that we do not publish graphic narratives, academic discourses, or works with footnotes. (Maximum word count: 5,000)

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. You may submit up to three poems per submission (include all three in one file).