The BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.

2025 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
Judged by Esmé Weijun Wang 

Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of the essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, a New York Times bestseller; its publication is the result of having won the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, has received accolades from LitHub, NPR Books, and the Chicago Review of Books. Wang was selected by Granta for their once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list of 21 authors under 40. In 2018 she received the prestigious Whiting Award for Nonfiction. She write essays that have been published in the Believer, Catapult, Hazlitt, and Salon. Her short story, “What Terrible Thing It Was,” was featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 anthology. Wang is also the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy, a full-service online writing school for people with limitations who want to write memoir and/or personal nonfiction.

GUIDELINES:
 

• Deadline: July 1, 2024
• First prize is $1,000 (in each genre) and publication in the Spring 2025 issue of BLR.  
  Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2025 issue of BLR.
• 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 Please note that we do not publish graphic narratives, academic discourses, or works with footnotes. (5,000 words maximum)
• Do not put your name or other identifying information on the manuscript document (or in the filename). Manuscripts are read blindly by reviewers, editors, and judges. 
• 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.)
• Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but we ask that you notify  us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.  We regret that there can be no refunds or substitutions for withdrawn work.
• All contest entries will also be considered for regular publication.
• Students/friends/colleagues/relations of a judge are not permitted to enter submissions to that judge's genre.
• BLR acquires first-time North American rights, and the right  to reprint in anthologies.  After publication, all other rights revert  to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate  acknowledgement to BLR is made.
   

We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.  Sample writing is available on our website.

We're happy to offer a 50% subscription discount to all authors who participate in the contest. (If you live outside the US, you must select the International option. Otherwise, we'll be unable to ship the journal to you. Thanks!)