Winning Words: A Reading with the 2023 BLR Prize Winners

Bellevue Literary Review invites you to celebrate the publication of our new issue and the winners of the 2023 BLR literary prizes. This year’s prizewinners—Lara Palmqvist in fiction, Caroline Harper New in poetry, and Jehanne Dubrow in nonfiction—will read from their winning work, as well as be in conversation with BLR editors Doris W. Cheng, Abba Belgrave, and Scott Oglesby. Karen K. Ford, Karan Kapoor, and Sabah Parsa will also present readings of their works, which received honorable mention.

Bellevue Literary Review is an award-winning independent literary journal that probes the nuances of our lives both in illness and health. The first literary journal to arise from a medical setting, BLR has published two print volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction annually since 2001. As a literary arts organization, BLR offers a wide range of events at the intersection of the arts and the sciences.

~~~~~

Prizewinners / readers: 

Lara Palmqvist is the winner of the 2019 Mary C. Mohr Award in Fiction, and is also the grateful recipient of awards and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Saari Residence in Finland, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, the Rotary Global Grant program in Sweden, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, through which she taught creative writing in Ukraine. Originally from New Mexico, she currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she is a Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

Caroline Harper New is a writer and visual artist from Bainbridge, Georgia. Her writing reckons with motherhood, ancestry, and natural disaster in the Gulf Coast, and is grounded in an academic background in anthropology. New is currently on a Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan and serves as the Dzanc Writer-in-Residence in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom, and two books of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes and Taste: A Book of Small Bites. Her third book of nonfiction, Exhibitions: Essays On Art & Atrocity, will be published in 2023.

Sabah Parsa was born in New York City and raised in Sterling, Virginia. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English and American Literature from NYU in 2020 and attended the inaugural Tin House autumn workshop in 2022. She currently resides in Brooklyn, where she writes both fiction and nonfiction pieces.

Karen K. Ford is an award-winning author of short fiction whose honors include top fiction prizes from Narrative and bosque (the magazine). She is a freelance editor and writing coach who leads a fiction workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Karen lives in Costa Mesa, California, with her rescue mutt, Dude.

Karan Kapoor is a poet based in New Delhi. Winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, a finalist for the Literary Taxidermy Competition, Ledbury Poetry Prize, and Julia Darling Memorial Prize, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Rattle, Colorado Review, Humber Literary Review, Frontier, New Welsh Review, and elsewhere.