Articles & Media
NPR’s Morning Edition
NPR’s Neda Ulaby interviews Danielle Ofri and Celeste Ng on “Morning Edition” about BLR’s 20th Anniversary (and how a literary journal came to be founded in a storied public hospital). More
BLR Turns 20!
For 20 years, “Bellevue Literary Review” has been at the forefront of publishing at intersection of healthcare and the arts. BLR publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about health, illness, and healing. Watch the historic celebration. Co-hosted by BLR editor-in-chief Danielle Ofri and actor Kelly AuCoin More
White Hot Light
Frank Huyler was different than the other doctor-writers I’d been reading. His patients weren’t named, not even with pseudonyms. They weren’t meticulously described with MFA-honed adjectives. His language seemed ordinary, his sentence structures plain. There was no thesaurus lurking just beyond the page. But it was not a literary laziness. It was a seduction. More
Florence Nightingale in the Age of Covid-19
May of 2020 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. That her bicentennial fell during a worldwide pandemic is both illuminating and ironic. Nightingale’s experience as a nurse during the Crimean War led her to three insights that came to define her professional life, insights as revolutionary as they were unpopular. More
How to Improve the Doctor-Patient Relationship
Danielle Ofri talks with Elena Sung from the “Power of the Patient Project” about how to improve the doctor-patient relationshipe. More
The Vaccine Anthropologist
The world’s richest countries are now its most vaccine-hesitant. Can we learn to trust our shots before the next pandemic? Danielle Ofri profiles Heidi Larson, a “vaccine anthropologist,” for The New Yorker. More
Reading the Body: Poetry, Dance & Disability
An exhilarating blend of poetry and dance, inspired by the challenges and possibilities of disability. Four dancers with disability create original choreography based on BLR poetry, set to music commissioned for this special event, plus ASL interpretation. More
BLR Spring Celebration
Danielle Ofri hosted this event celebrating the winners of the 2021 BLR literary prizes: featuring exciting new works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus interviews by BLR editors More
Taking Stock of the Second Covid Surge
As the pandemic raged from the winter surge through to the spring slog, my Postmortem folder lit up with a dispiriting regularity. I opened it with dread as it revealed which of my patients had perished that week. More
Reading the Body: Poetry, Dance & Disability
“Reading the Body,” explores disability through dance and poetry. Four acclaimed dancers create original choreography based on BLR poetry, More
Covid Writing Goes Viral
Covid Writing Goes Viral: How Literary & Social Media Writing Became a Lifeline during the Pandemic. Danielle Ofri hosts Abraham Verghese and Eric Topol about the role of writing during the Covid pandemic. More
Black in the Ivory
Doctor-writers discuss how writing writing can–or cannot–confront racism in academia and healthcare. More
The Doctors Blackwell
Few people today know much about what Elizabeth Blackwell actually did, and fewer are even aware of her younger sister Emily, by far the more accomplished clinician. More
Covid Duets
Given the death and destruction all around us during the Covid pandemic, it felt unseemly to complain about coming home to a strange cello every night. But playing someone else’s cello is like sleeping on someone else’s mattress: everything feels wrong. More
“Frontline Workers”
Even after Covid-19 is tamed by the forthcoming vaccines, health care workers will still be frontline workers. Because you never know what will show up tomorrow. More
