Celebrating the Art of Writing: Leslin Supports the 2026 BLR Poetry Prize

Literature is a powerful tool for understanding human experiences of health and illness, loss, and healing. That’s why Leslin proudly supports the Bellevue Literary Review and celebrates this year’s prize recipients.

Each year, the Bellevue Literary Review (BLR), an award-winning journal at the intersection of medicine and the human spirit, honors outstanding voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Leslin is honored to fund The John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, recognizing writers who illuminate our shared experience of health and the body with courage and craft.

The 2026 Prize goes to Dara Laine for her poem "Telling the Bees." Based in Baltimore and rooted in a hay farm in New Jersey, Laine writes with restrained lyricism and domestic realism, centering on grief, memory, and what she calls the sacred ordinary. Her work appears in American Poetry Journal, Pine Hills Review, and Sky Island Journal. In "Telling the Bees, “she does what only the best poets can: she finds the ritual in sorrow and makes it bearable.

Honorable mention goes to Miranda Saake for "Stinson Beach." A writer, teacher, and mother from Northern California, Saake brings a voice that is both grounded and luminous. Published in The Rebis, Clarion, and Gossamer Arts, and recently shortlisted for the prestigious UK Bridport Prize, she reminds us that places and pain are often inseparable.

At Leslin, we believe that stories about health are powerful experiences that connect us through our shared humanity. They allow us to express how we experience health and illness, as well as how we suffer, endure, survive, and recover. Supporting BLR and its writers is one way we embody this belief.

Congratulations to Dara, Miranda, and all this year's BLR prize recipients.

To learn more about the Bellevue Literary Review and its literary prizes, visit www.blreview.org.