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Ms. Bonnie Biafore ’72
Bonnie Biafore ’72 has come a long way since she first entered the doors of Moravian Preparatory School as a 5th grader. But it was the MPS Creative Writing Club and English teacher Mrs. Gonda that really ignited her love of writing. She still fondly recalls the club’s major project, SAVE: Scott and Amy Value the Earth.
She believes that “writing is not waiting for the muse,” and for her, it was more of a fortuitous intersection. An employee came upon a post offering an opportunity to pen a technical book on online personal finance, coincidentally a topic Bonnie had been working on for a course for a non-profit. And thus, her first book was born. She encourages everyone to offer and share their talents and expertise with nearby organizations saying, “You can get experience in whatever you want by volunteering.”
Since 1999, she has written more than 30 best-selling books including Practical Project Management with Microsoft Project 2016, QuickBooks 2016: The Missing Manual (Intuit’s Official Guide to QuickBooks), Project 2013: The Missing Manual, and Your Project Management Coach. On the non-technical side, she’s also co-written “Fresh Squeezed,” a funny crime thriller about incompetent hitmen and not so bright criminals.
Her undergraduate years were spent at MIT. She had difficulty selecting a major, starting out in electrical engineering but ultimately graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design and “way too many high level math courses for an architecture major.” Eventually, she applied to Columbia University and pursued a Master’s degree in Structural Engineering. She had been working as a structural engineer for several years, but came to the realization that it just wasn’t for her. Opportunity struck when she was asked to lead her firm’s Computer Aided Design (CAD) implementation project, which led to work with the Graphic Date System (GDS) software vendor and ultimately, her interest in project management.
She finds it ironic that she became a project manager. She was a self-proclaimed “big planner, but not when it came to my career. My career path had no planning; it all kind of happened by chance. I encourage everyone to be open to opportunities the universe presents and make conscious decisions of whether or not to pursue.”
In recent years, she has authored dozens of courses for LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com). Initially, she had declined LinkedIn’s offer not once, but twice. After the second rebuff, she had a change of heart and contacted LI the next day to revisit the offer. She traces the origin of most of her LI and consulting courses back to that very first book that came about by chance.
Bonnie currently resides in Colorado, where she enjoys communing with the mountains and wildlife. In her “down time,” she enjoys hobbies like aerial dance, banjo, and improv comedy. She also enjoys travel and recently journeyed to Iceland. Hiking the Inca Trail to explore Machu Picchu is on the top of her bucket list. Additionally, she is a volunteer educational counselor for MIT and interviews prospective students.
Reflecting on her years at Moravian, she shared that the setting of MPS always inspired her, with the ability to wander through God’s Acre and experience that feeling of history and tradition. “Moravian provided me with high quality education that gave me a solid foundation that has supported everything I’ve done since.”
