The BLR seeks  high-caliber, unpublished* work, broadly and creatively related to our  themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.


Fiction:
The 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 We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi,  horror).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.   

We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.  Samples from each issue are available in our online archive.

We consider simultaneous submissions, but request that you inform us  immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

If you are a current subscriber, you may submit under the No-Fee Submissions for Current BLR Subscribers  category. If you'd like to subscribe, please use the Subscribe  + Submit category.

The BLR seeks  high-caliber, unpublished* work, broadly and creatively related to our  themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.


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, no academic  discourses or works with footnotes. Maximum 5,000 words.

We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.  Samples from each issue are available in our online archive.

We consider simultaneous submissions, but request that you inform us  immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

If you are a current subscriber, you may submit under the No-Fee Submissions for Current BLR Subscribers category. If you'd like to subscribe, please use the Subscribe  + Submit category.

The BLR seeks  high-caliber, unpublished work, broadly and creatively related to our  themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.

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. 

Please submit no more than three poems. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document.

We consider simultaneous submissions, but request that you inform us  immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

If you are a current subscriber, you may submit under the No-Fee Submissions for Current BLR Subscribers category. If you'd like to subscribe, please use the Subscribe + Submit category.

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

Goldenberg Prize for Fiction

Judged by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the young adult novel Finding my Voice. She is one of a handful of American journalists granted a visa to North Korea and was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing. Lee has received an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian. Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family.

GUIDELINES:   

• Deadline: July 1, 2023

• First prize is $1,000 (in each genre) and publication in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.  
  Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.

• Fiction: The 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!)

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

Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction

Judged by Edgar Gomez

Edgar Gomez is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. Their words have appeared in Poets & Writers, Catapult, Lithub, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere online and in print. Their memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, was called a “breath of fresh air” by The New York Times.

GUIDELINES:   

• Deadline: July 1, 2023

• First prize is $1,000 (in each genre) and publication in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.  
  Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2024 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, no academic discourses or works with footnotes. Maximum 5,000 words. 

• 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!)

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

John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry

Judged by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a Guatelombian (Guatemalan-Colombian) American poet and screenwriter living in Brooklyn by way of Massachusetts. She is the author of peluda, which explores the intersections of Latina identity, feminism, hair removal, and what it means to belong, and Dreaming of You, about bringing Selena back to life through a seance and the disastrous consequences that follow. She is working on adapting Dreaming of You into a film. Her next novel Candelaria (Fall 2023, Astra House) is about an abuela at the end of the world, and how her granddaughters started it. She is the co-host of podcast Say More with Olivia Gatwood. 

GUIDELINES:

• Deadline: July 1, 2023
• First prize is $1,000 (in each genre) and publication in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.   Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.
• 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 3 poems per submission (please include all 3 in one file).
• 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!)

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.

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 that only general submissions can be made through this category.  Contest entries must be submitted under the appropriate contest category.

Fiction:
The 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.   

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, no academic  discourses or works with footnotes. Maximum 5,000 words.

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. 

Please submit no more than three poems. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document.

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

We consider simultaneous submissions, but request that you inform us  immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

(If you live outside the United States, you must select the option that includes international shipping. Otherwise we can't mail it to you. Thank you for understanding.)

Give yourself the gift of literature ~ subscribe to the BLR today!

The Bellevue Literary Review is a special community of readers and writers, and we value each person who joins us.

As you think about meaningful gifts for friends and family, consider a unique and remarkably affordable gift for the thoughtful and curious person in your life: a subscription to the Bellevue Literary Review.

NOTE: New subscriptions will begin with Issue 42, out this Spring!  

(If you live outside the United States, you must select the option that includes international shipping. Otherwise we can't mail it to you. Thank you for understanding.)

We recognize that subscribing to the journal is a tangible—and very much appreciated—way of supporting the BLR, thus the submission fee is waived for current subscribers.

Please, no more than 2 active submissions at a time. Please note that only general submissions can be made through this category.  Contest entries must be submitted under the appropriate contest category.

This portal is for BLR subscribers only.  

• If you are unsure  of your subscription status, or if you subscribe under a different  name, please send us an email at info@blreview.org and we'll get  back to you ASAP.
  
• If you are not a BLR subscriber, please submit under the General Submissions category, or use the Subscribe + Submit category.  Manuscripts accidentally uploaded here by non-subscribers will not be reviewed.

Fiction:

The 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.   

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, no academic  discourses or works with footnotes. Maximum 5,000 words.

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. 

Please submit no more than three poems. Each poem should be on a separate page within a single document. 

We consider simultaneous submissions, but request that you inform us  immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Pick up an issue of BLR, including theme issues on reading the body, a good life, memory, family, war, multiculturalism, aging, and the environment. Your can also get a copy of our annual contest issues.

Please specify which issue you want. 

To explore our full collection of BLR issues, please visit our website.  (You can also purchase digital issues there (for Kindle and others), as well as subscriptions, and discount cases of issues for your class or reading group.

(If you live outside the United States, you must select the option that includes international shipping. Otherwise we can't mail it to you. Thank you for understanding.)