Anna Marie Trester – 51

About me

Anna Marie Trester founded Career Linguist in 2013. As the author of Bringing Linguistics to Work and Employing Linguistics for Bloomsbury Press, she speaks and gives workshops as Career Linguist and with organizational partners PIER Consulting Group, The FrameWorks Institute, and Anecdote International.

Prior to joining FrameWorks, she served as the director of the MA in Language and Communication (MLC) program for the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she worked with students to apply their sociolinguistic training to professional contexts. She has taught courses at Georgetown University, Howard University, University of Maryland, University College, and Boise State. Her courses have covered cross-cultural communication, language and social media, and the ethnography of communication. 

As an applied sociolinguist, Anna has research interests in improvisation, performance, narrative, intertextuality, professional self-presentation, language and identity, language in social media, and the language of business. She is the co-editor (with renowned linguistics professor Deborah Tannen) of Discourse 2.0, published in 2013 by Georgetown University Press. Anna was profiled by the Linguistics Society of America in its December, 2014, member spotlight. She received her MA from New York University and her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University.

What do you do and why do you do it?

I help people connect to and connect through the power of story. I like to think about life as presenting us with myriad opportunities every day to either engage or retreat, and that if we cultivate our ability to pay attention through story listening, we can connect just a little bit more often.

What changed for you after age 50?

I happened to be finishing my 2nd book when I was 50, and I had a breakthrough when I was wrestling with the feedback from a particularly critical reviewer. I found the courage to trust myself. To trust that I knew what I wanted to say and that it was worth saying in MY VOICE!!!

What would you tell the 20 or 30-year-old YOU?

Your way of experiencing the world matters – trust your perspective.

What do you think you’ll tell yourself in retrospect at the end of your life?

I hope to be able to say that I really listened – and that I found more ways to appreciate my way of experiencing the world by learning about how others do.

What impact do you think increased visibility can have on your business?

I would love to be able to share my approach to languaging inclusion more widely.

Who or what inspires you and why?

I recently read Dacher Keltner’s book on Awe, and there is something powerfully connecting about this experience which has been inspiring me in various ways – for example, I challenged all of my students (in a recent ethnography of communication class that I taught) to take a step back from their projects to think about something they observed as part of their research that invoked the experience of Awe. Listening to their experiences and observations about Awe made me feel Awe…

Something else I’d like to share

Something that has stuck with me since my improv days: “Treat others as if they were poets, geniuses, and artists, and they will be”. If I were asked to put something on a billboard, that would be it – at least today! 🙂