Grace Members in the News

Week to week we see one another at church but often do not know the fine achievements of our members. In this issue of our e-News, we are highlighting two longtime members of Grace who recently received honors for their writing. We offer congratulations to Michele Bombardier (Bainbridge Island's first Poet Laureate) whose recent work was set to music and performed in NYC at OperaAmerica. We also offer congratulations to Ronda Broatch whom many of us know for her fine photography. She has received numerous awards for her literary achievements – the latest being the “Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize.”

Michele Bombardier, longtime member at Grace, returned to graduate school in 2015 for her MFA in poetry after decades of working as a speech-language pathologist. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Bainbridge Island, winner of the 2024 NORward Prize in Poetry, and the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her poems have been published in JAMA, Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry International, Alaska Quarterly Review, Parabola, and many others. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Centrum, Mineral School, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the Edith Wharton Residency, and support from Humanities Washington. Her work was recently set to music and performed and recorded in NYC at OPERA America. Michele is a narrative medicine facilitator and the founder of Fishplate Poetry, raising money for humanitarian aid through poetry workshops and retreats.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press Sally Albiso Prize finalist, 2023), and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize, Word Works Tenth Gate Prize, and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. Her poem “Refuge,” won the Cloudbank Poetry Contest (2024), and her poem, “Upon Reading Šalamun's Opera Buffa, the Trees Outside My Window Reel and Rhumba,” won the Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize (2025). Ronda has been awarded residencies to Centrum, Soapstone, and the Whiteley Center, and was a recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. She is an MFA candidate at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, and will graduate in July 2025. She’s been a member at Grace since Advent 1999.