George Held, a native of Scarsdale, NY, attended public schools there and graduated from Brown University in 1958. After teaching English at The Kamehameha Schools, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, from 1958-64, he earned a Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1967 and taught English at Queens College, City University of New York, until his retirement in 2004.
He was a Fulbright lecturer in American literature and the English language at Comenius University, Bratislava, and Charles University, Prague, from 1973-76. He has traveled in most of the countries in Europe as well as Canada and Mexico. He began to publish poems in 1990 and has now published nine collections, including Martial Artist (Toad Press, 2005), a group of his translations, from the Latin, of the Roman poet Martial, and W Is for War (Červená Barva Press, 2006), anti-war poems. His poems, short stories, translations, essays, and book reviews have appeared in such places as Circumference, Commonweal, Confrontation, The Notre Dame Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work also appears frequently in the so-called underground press as well as in poetry anthologies. His most frequent subjects are nature, sex, and death, and he often writes satirically about society and politics. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has co-edited The Ledge Poetry & Fiction Magazine since 1991 and edited an anthology of erotic verse, Touched by Eros (2001). He has given readings from his work throughout the New York metropolitan area and upstate as well as in Maryland and Pennsylvania. He has served on the executive board of the Long Island environmental organization The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum since 1991. Held lives in Greenwich Village with his wife, Cheryl.