Penelope Trunk is an American businesswoman, author, and blogger. Her work focuses on the intersection of work and life. Trunk is the author of the books Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, The New American Dream: A Blueprint for a New Path to Success, and The Power of Mentors: The Guide to Finding and Learning from Your Ideal Mentor. She blogged at Brazen Careerist before leaving that company. She now runs Quistic, her latest start-up venture—an education company—and maintains an eponymous blog featuring career advice. Trunk wrote a column for the Boston Globe that was syndicated in 200 newspapers across the United States.
Trunk worked for ten years as a marketing executive in the software industry. During this time, she started the companies math.com, ECityDeals, and Brazen Careerist. Trunk’s decisions about her career have been written about in Time and The Guardian. In September 2009, Trunk was replaced as CEO of Brazen Careerist. She stated, "When the company was clearly moving too fast for me to keep up as CEO, I badgered another board member to be CEO. He told me a number of reasons why that wouldn’t work – he had had two huge exits and he wasn’t planning to be CEO again, and another company wanted him to be CEO, and he wants to watch his kids play football. These are all good reasons that I overcame, and I got him to agree to be interim CEO."
Writing
Trunk began writing business advice when Fortune magazine published an open call for a woman to write about her own life as an executive and Trunk won the job. She has been a columnist at Business 2.0 magazine, Bankrate.com and Yahoo! Finance. According to an article by Richard Rierson, "She has a reputation for giving advice that is counter-intuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion." Writing in the New York Times, Marci Alboher called Trunk "one of the most popular career writers around."
Personal life
Trunk moved to Madison, Wisconsin in 2006, before relocating to a farm near Darlington, Wisconsin. In September 2009, Trunk was preparing to have an abortion, but while waiting out a state legal requirement, suffered a miscarriage during a company board meeting. Trunk's miscarriage was covered by numerous news outlets, including The Guardian. Trunk has two sons by her first husband. She homeschools her children. 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. Trunk has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.
