Bonnie didn’t know she wanted to work in newspapers when she graduated from Florida State with an English degree. But, as it turns out, she has loved this profession for 30 years.

She taught high-school English for a year in Tallahassee, and then moved to Washington to do freelance writing for The Smithsonian. She began her journalism career as an editorial assistant for The Air Force Times.

Shortly before The Journals, a group of Washington suburban newspapers owned by the parent company of Air Force Times, went daily in 1981, Bonnie was hired to work on the papers’ features desk. She wrote a weekly fashion column and features, and designed the Tempo sections. After a few years, she moved to the news desk and ran it till 1988.

She started at The Post in October 1989 as a part-timer on the Style copy desk, soon filling in for Sports and the Metro Weeklies. Bonnie switched to full-time on the news desk a few years later, and then moved to Outlook where she ended up as art director. The Food section was where she always wanted to be; she began working in that department in 2004. She writes the weekly Dinner in Minutes column and the monthly Washington Cooks column, in addition to supervising all recipes, editing features, reviewing cookbooks, managing photo shoots and contributing to the section’s daily All We Can Eat blog.

She is married to Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow in defense issues at The American Enterprise Institute. They have two sons.