ABOUT JIM KOSMO

Capt. Jim Kosmo is winner of sixteen national book awards and a two-time national Editor of the Year. In 2010 he retired as a Mississippi riverboat pilot and partner with the Padelford Riverboat Co., of St. Paul, MN and returned to writing. He wrote the national-award-winning Still Standing: The Story of SSG JohnKriesel, a motivational memoir about a Minnesota National Guard soldier who was very seriously injured in Iraq and helped Lt. Col. Mark Weber self-publish “Tell My Sons” which was then acquired by Random House. In 2017 he published Monsters in the Hallway, an international “best fiction” award winning mystery novel based largely on his own life growing up in a single parent family in Eau Claire, WI during the 1950s. 

He was a military journalist with the U.S. Air Force before returning to civilian life to serve as a crime reporter in Las Vegas (NV),managing editor of a chain of suburban newspapers in Minneapolis-St. Paul (MN),and public relations executive with Campbell-Mithun Advertising, Twin Cities Area Metropolitan Transit Commission, and American Medical Association(Chicago). He joined the family business, Padelford Riverboats, as president in 1980.

Kosmo is past president (2013-14) of the Rotary Club of St.Paul, business representative on the Minnesota National Guard Senior Advisory Task Force, past chair of the Rivers Division of the National Passenger Vessel Association, and former mayor of Bayport, MN. 

In 1994, Kosmo attended the Houston Maritime Academy in New Orleans, LA following a three-year navigation training program and was licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard to operate hundred-ton commercial passenger vessels as a U.S. Merchant Marine officer. He graduated from Metropolitan State University in Journalism, studied for an MBA at the University of St. Thomas, and became an Accredited Member of the Public Relations Society of America. 

Kosmo and his wife, Shelley, have a blended family of eight adult children and twelve grandchildren. He resides in Bayport.