In 2010, Captain Jim Kosmo retired as a Mississippi riverboat pilot and partner with the Padelford Riverboats Co., of Saint Paul, Minnesota, to spend more time writing and working with new authors through his company, Author’s Advocates, LLC. He wrote the national-award-winning Still Standing: The Story of SSG John Kriesel and helped Lieutenant Colonel Mark Weber self-publish Tell My Sons, which was then acquired by Random House Publishing. In early 2018, he wrote the national-award-winning novel Monsters in the Hallway.

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Kosmo is past president of the Rotary Club of Saint Paul, member of the Minnesota National Guard Senior Advisory Task Force, and former mayor of Bayport, Minnesota. He spent twenty years as a newspaper reporter and editor and as a public relations manager in Minneapolis and Chicago. After joining the family riverboat business in 1980 as president, he was licensed by the US Coast Guard to operate hundred-ton commercial passenger vessels as a US Merchant Marine officer.

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