Photo: Greg Kosmicki
Brief Biography:
GREG KOSMICKI is a poet and social worker living in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997 and is currently in the process of passing the operation of the press along to others.
Geosi Gyasi: Do you mind telling us anything about Omaha, Nebraska?
Greg Kosmicki: Omaha is a great place. It’s a city of a little over 600,000 people, right on the Missouri River, with great restaurants, great art scene, great poetry scene, with lots of parks, and beautiful old and new buildings and lots of jobs. It’s one of the few places in the United States that didn’t get hit by the recession. You all should move to Omaha, and bring your wonderful cultures with you.
The rest of the interview will be available in my forthcoming book (2016) by Lamar University Press Books.
Geosi Reads 
Great interview!
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Way to go, Greg!
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I am a friend of Greg Kosmicki. I met him at UNL where he was a student in one of my poetry writing classes. He mentions me in his interview. We are very much alike in how we work. I think we have learned from each other. When I read an interview with him he says things I would say were I asked these same questions. His older brother was killed in a car wreck. After I met Greg my younger brother died in a car wreck. Accordingly there is this powerful bond between us, which I have never tried to understand or put into words. He claims to have been inspired by my work with my Best Cellar Press. What he has done with backwaters is enormous in contrast to what I did. I was at The Chautauqua Institution a couple summers ago, and sat down in a huge dining room at a table where everybody there was a poet and all raving about how Kosmicki’s backwaters press is THE MOST IMPORTANT POETRY PRESS IN AMERICA. For its generosity and integrity. I am proud to be part of his life and his great work.
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Reblogged this on laramie harlow: researcher-adoptee and commented:
Stephen F. Austin State University Press has published Greg Kosmicki’s newest book of poetry, Sheep Can Recognize Individual Faces. Laura Madeline Wiseman interviews him for her blog, “The Chapbook Interview: Greg Kosmicki on Death, Work, and the Writing Life” (March 18, 2015). In this interview, Kosmicki gives a nifty explanation of a chapbook’s advantages: “Because chapbooks are shorter, they force you to leave out the poem about your parents growing old and the one about when Old Shep your dog died if the rest of your chapbook is about all the time you spent in the army smoking dope and lobbing grenades or whatever. A chapbook is more like a short story—you have to have a unified action and everything has to relate to the same theme, all lead to the ending climax, just because it’s short, and you don’t have the space to goof around.” PERFECT and EXACT STATEMENT! (with my own two chapbooks I heartily agree)
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