Penelope Trunk is a published novelist with a 10-year track record of success in business and a notable career as a professional athlete.

Prior to writing for Bankrate.com, she wrote a career column for Business 2.0 magazine. As a freelance business writer she has written everything ranging from features to essays for publications such as The London Times, Los Angeles magazine, Time magazine, and the Wall Street Journal.

Ms. Trunk worked as an executive in the high-tech industry for more than 10 years. She rode the wild wave of the Internet boom through an IPO, a merger and a bankruptcy. She founded an educational software company, which she sold. She then founded a government auction company, which the investment-banking firm Robertson-Stephens ranked No. 1 in its category after only six months of business. Earlier, she launched business units for Fortune-100 companies, including Ingram Micro and Toshiba.

Prior to her career in corporate America, Ms. Trunk was a professional beach volleyball player. She was ranked (just barely) in the top 50 in the world, but she was one of the most heavily sponsored players on the volleyball tour. This is where she learned she was good at marketing. And this is where she learned the art of switching careers gracefully.

Penelope Trunk writes fiction under the name Adrienne Eisen. As a pioneer integrator of technology and entertainment, she won the New Media Invision Award for storytelling (other winners were Sony Pictures and the writers of "The X-Files"), and she has been a visiting presenter at universities all over the world, including Brown, in Rhode Island, and the University of Paris, in France. Her writing is in the curriculum at universities throughout the United States and Europe.

She studied creative writing in Boston University's graduate program, where she was nominated for the Henfield Award. Under the name Adrienne Eisen, she wrote the novel "Making Scenes." Her writing was praised by Publisher's Weekly as "quick, punchy prose that will keep the reader riveted."