Welcome to Poetry at the Lion! All poets and poetry fans are welcome!
Each month, a featured poet will read from their works and shape the evening’s experience. Poetry lovers can stop on their way to eat out or bring a brown bag meal and stay for the whole evening. Light refreshments will be provided.
The featured poet for January will be Greg Kosmicki. Greg, a poet and retired social worker who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, was born in Alliance, Nebraska and grew up on a wheat farm a few miles north of there, near where Carhenge was later erected.
After navy service during the Vietnam War era, Greg received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he studied under the poet Greg Kuzma.He has worked in numerous jobs since then, including a 24-year stint as a social services worker for the State of Nebraska.
He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997, which published over 120 books of poetry, interviews, anthologies, and fiction, before it became an imprint of The University of Nebraska Press in 2017. The press received more than 20 Nebraska Book Awards during his tenure. In 2011, the press was given the Jane Pope Geske award by the Nebraska Center for the Book for exceptional literary contributions.
Greg’s poetry has been published in numerous magazines since 1975 (see here), both print and online, and have been anthologized multiple times. He is the author of 15 books and chapbooks of poems. Two of his poems were selected by Garrison Keillor and read by him on “The Writer's Almanac” on Minnesota Public Radio, and another was selected for Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.” He received Individual Artist’s Fellowships for his poetry from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2000 and 2006.
It’s as Good Here as it Gets Anywhere, from WSC Press, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award in 2017. His most recent collection of poems, The dog has no answers, was published in 2024 by Main Street Rag Publications.
He and Debbie, his wife of 52 years, are the parents of three children and grandparents of two.