Subscribing to the journal is a tangible—and very much appreciated—way of supporting the BLR.  The $25 fee is our regular one-year subscription price, so the submission is free with your subscription order.  (If you live outside the United States, you must select the option that includes international shipping in order to receive print copies. Otherwise we will process your order as a digital subscription. Thank you for understanding.)
 

Please also feel free to use this category if you are a subscriber who would like to renew your subscription while making a submission. 

Please note: Only general submissions can be made through this category. Contest entries must be submitted under the appropriate contest category when the BLR Prizes are open for submission.

Fiction:
Bellevue Literary Review seeks character-driven fiction with  original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi,  horror) and have only occasionally published flash fiction. While we are always interested in creative explorations in style, we do lean toward classic short stories.
 

Creative 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 feel alive, and dazzle us with thoughtful and creative analysis that allows  these anecdotes to serve a larger purpose. Please note that we do not publish graphic narratives, academic discourses, or works with footnotes.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.
 

We encourage you to read BLR before you submit. Please check out our online archive.

 

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.
• Fiction/nonfiction word max is 5,000 words, though most of our published prose is in the range of 2,000-4,000 words.
• Include no more than three poems per submission. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document.
• There is a $5 fee per general submission but it’s waived for current subscribers. (If you are not a current subscriber, you can subscribe when you submit your work and take advantage of free submission.) These fees help BLR fund publication of the journal, please contact us at info@blreview.org if you're experiencing financial hardship.
• We strive to provide several reviewers for each manuscript and kindly ask your patience in this necessarily slow process. But 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. Authors also 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.
• All submissions must be of previously unpublished work.* 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.
   

(*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.)