Contest Submission - Fiction

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

 

2026 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Judged by Joan Silber
 

Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction. The most recent is Mercy, out in September 2025. Secrets of Happiness was a NY Times Editors’ Choice and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Improvement won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in New York and taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.

GUIDELINES:   
 

• Deadline: July 1, 2025
• First prize is $1,000 (in each genre) and publication in the Spring 2026 issue of BLR.  
       Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2026 issue of BLR.
• Fiction: Bellevue Literary Review seeks character-driven fiction with  original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror).  Our word max is 5,000, though 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.  
• 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 We regret that there can be no refunds or substitutions for withdrawn work.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. Samples from each issue are 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!)