BLR editors Danielle Ofri and Doris W. Cheng are joined in conversation by poet Phillip B. Williams and novelist Weike Wang. With special guests: playwright Sarah Ruhl and scientist/writer Joseph Osmundson.

Covid has generated unusual creative pressures: Must writers write about the pandemic? Does bearing witness to inequities impact creative output? How do we make art in a time of suffering? Join Bellevue Literary Review—the award-winning literary journal that bridges healthcare and the arts—for a virtual discussion plus readings from the newest works of these acclaimed writers.

Even if you can't "be there" on Sept 28th at 7 pm, RSVP anyway, because your link will stay active and you can watch later.

Read more about BLR and find copies of the journal at BLReview.org.

Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD is a primary care doctor at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is a clinical professor of medicine at NYU. Her newest book is "When We Do Harm, A Doctor Confronts Medical Error." 

Doris W. Cheng is an immigrant Taiwanese American writer and Assistant Fiction Editor at Bellevue Literary Review. She is the author of a fiction chapbook, Earthling (Word West Press, 2021). Her short stories and essays have appeared in New Orleans Review, Witness, Berkeley Fiction Review, The Normal School, The Cincinnati Review, The Pinch, and other literary magazines.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior, which was winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He teaches at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.

Weike Wang is the author of Chemistry (Knopf 2017) and Joan Is Okay (Random House 2022). She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is included in the 2019 Best American Short Storiesand O. Henry Prizes. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Barnard College.

Sarah Ruhl, author of Love Poems in Quarantine, is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a Lilly award. She is a 13P and New Dramatists member and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist, activist, and writer based in New York City. He has a PhD in Molecular Biophysics. His book of essays, Virology, was published in 2022. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, too. His book, Capsid: A Love Song won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Inside/Out is now out from Sibling Rivalry Press (January, 2018).