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Penelope Trunk (born Adrienne Roston; legal name Adrienne Greenheart; pen name "Adrienne Eisen" December 10, 1966)) is an American writer and entrepreneur. Trunk co-founded four venture-backed Internet startups, and TechCruch named Trunk, along with  Susan Wojcicki, Sheryl Sandberg, and Marissa Mayer, on the list of 30 most influential women in the tech industry.


Early life

Trunk grew up in
Wilmette, Illinois Wilmette is a village in New Trier Township, Cook County, Illinois, United States. Bordering Lake Michigan and Evanston, Illinois, it is located north of Chicago's downtown district. Wilmette had a population of 27,087 at the 2010 census. The ...
, until she was 14 and the police removed her from her parent's house. Then she lived with her grandparents in Glencoe and attended
New Trier High School New Trier High School (, also known as New Trier Township High School or NTHS) is a public four-year high school, with its main campus for sophomores through seniors located in Winnetka, Illinois, United States, and a campus in Northfield, Illino ...
. She graduated from
Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , p ...
, before moving to
Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world ...
to pursue a career as a professional beach volleyball player. On the Women’s Professional Beach Volleyball Tour she was ranked 17th in the US.


Career


Hypertext

Trunk published ''Six Sex Scenes'' in 1996. In 1998 Trunk won the ''New Media Invision Award'' for Digital Storytelling. As part of the hypertext canon, ''Six Sex Scenes'' influenced other writers in terms of structure and content.


Journalism

Trunk began writing business advice when ''
Fortune Fortune may refer to: General * Fortuna or Fortune, the Roman goddess of luck * Luck * Wealth * Fortune, a prediction made in fortune-telling * Fortune, in a fortune cookie Arts and entertainment Film and television * ''The Fortune'' (1931 film) ...
'' magazine published an open call for a woman to write about her own life as an executive. Trunk won the job and became a columnist at ''
Business 2.0 ''Business 2.0'' was a monthly magazine publication founded by magazine entrepreneur Chris Anderson, Mark Gross, and journalist James Daly in order to chronicle the rise of the "New Economy". First published in July 1998, the magazine was sold ...
'' magazine. Subsequently she wrote for '' Bankrate.com, Yahoo! Finance.'' and ''
The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
''. Her blog posts were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers.


Books

In 2001 Trunk published ''Making Scenes'' with Alt-X (a subsidiary of
University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University o ...
), which is a book based on pages previously published on her website. Andrew Stern wrote that it was a publishing experiment of going from nonlinear format to linear instead of the other way around. Making Scenes was republished by Emily Books in 2012. Trunk's second book, ''Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success'', was published by Warner Books.


Entrepreneurship

Trunk worked for ten years as a marketing executive in the software industry. During this time, she founded the companies math.com and eCityDeals which were both acquired. Trunk has written about her career in ''
Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and event (philosophy), events that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various me ...
'' and ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
''. She co-founded Brazen Careerist and it became a social network for generation Y to get jobs from their blogs. The company would later focus on virtual career events instead, having failed to draw millennials from LinkedIn. Trunk tried reality TV and making goat cheese which failed. So she became a career coach. While living on the farm Trunk co-founded Quistic, an online learning company.


Personal life

Trunk married Nino in New York City and had two children. The family moved to
Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin by population, after Milwaukee, and the 80th ...
in 2006, before relocating to a farm near Darlington, Wisconsin. Trunk filed for divorce. The ''New York Times'' interviewed parenting experts who warned Trunk to stop blogging about her divorce. Trunk did not stop. Trunk has two sons by her first husband. After she and her first husband divorced, Trunk married her second husband, a farmer. Trunk's accounts of physical abuse in the relationship with her current husband have been discussed on the feminist website Jezebel. In September 2009, Trunk was preparing to have an
abortion Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus. An abortion that occurs without intervention is known as a miscarriage or "spontaneous abortion"; these occur in approximately 30% to 40% of pre ...
, but while waiting out a state legal requirement, she suffered a
miscarriage Miscarriage, also known in medical terms as a spontaneous abortion and pregnancy loss, is the death of an embryo or fetus before it is able to survive independently. Miscarriage before 6 weeks of gestation is defined by ESHRE as biochemica ...
during a company board meeting. Her Tweets about the incident received widespread media attention. It was around this time, Marin Cogan recalled in an article for ''The Cut'', that Trunk's blog began to take on a darker tone, less appealing than the one that had made her the "Sheryl Sandberg long before Sandberg wrote '' Lean In''". Cogan came to feel she and other early career women had been "mistaken in assuming that Trunk’s brazen careerism was a feminist project in any meaningful sense." Trunk describes herself as having Asperger syndrome after deciding many criteria for the disorder applied to her.


Bibliography

Hypertexts * ''Six Sex Scenes'' (Alt-X, 1993) * ''What Fits: A Hypertext Novela'' (Eastgate Reading Room, 1994) * ''Considering a Baby'' (Iowa Review, 2001) Books * "Making Scenes" (as Adrienne Eisen) (Broadvision, April 2001, ) * ''Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success'' (Warner, May 2007, ) * ''The New American Dream: A Blueprint for a New Path to Success'' (Hyperink, July 2012, ) * ''The Power of Mentors: The Guide to Finding and Learning from Your Ideal Mentor'' (Hyperink, October 2012)


References


External links


Official personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trunk, Penelope 1966 births 21st-century American non-fiction writers American bloggers American business writers Women business writers American women in business Brandeis University alumni Living people New Trier High School alumni People from Darlington, Wisconsin People from Wilmette, Illinois 21st-century American women writers American women non-fiction writers American women bloggers