In 2000, Danielle Ofri, a relatively new attending physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, asked her medical students to do something new with their patient histories and treatment plans. Instead of instructing medical students to record formulaic notes, she requested they ask their patients what it was like to have osteoporosis or diabetes or cancer. When she read the resulting essays, a light flicked on. There was an urgency to storytelling about the world of the body—be it the experience of illness and healing or being a patient or caregiver.
Thus, Ofri and two other physicians, Jerome Lowenstein and New York University’s then chair of medicine Martin Blaser, were inspired to create Bellevue Literary Review (BLR), with Ofri as editor in chief. Fiction editor Ronna Wineberg and poetry editors Donna Baier Stein and Roxanna Font Aliaga completed the founding editorial team. Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026, BLR illuminates the nuances of lives in illness and in health through two annual print issues of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, plus a growing platform of online events and content. {read}