He was awarded a Maclellan Foundation Scholarship to attend Covenant College in Georgia in 1990, and graduated with a double major in English and History in 1993.
Belz was enrolled in the Creative Writing program at New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
In 2003 Belz founded Observable Readings, a poetry series and imprint in St.
[6] In 2013, he received media attention for a Craigslist ad he placed to sell custom poems.
[12][13] Belz's poetry has appeared in Fence, Exquisite Corpse, The Atlantic and The Washington Post, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.