Denise Sullivan's Biography

"Denise Sullivan represents the insider intellectual stamina of rock 'n' roll journalism without the pomp and pretense. She is the past and future of the form, rolled into one uncanny style."
---Pop Matters, February 2012

Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop, chronicling 50 years of liberation and the music at the root of political and social movement. She is also the author of The White Stripes, Sweethearts of the Blues, a trenchant biography of the Detroit blues and garage-rock duo and the music of their region and Rip It Up, Rock'n'Roll Rulebreakers, a collection of 20 interviews with iconoclastic and rulebreaking musicians including Ike Turner, Wanda Jackson, Talking Heads and Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Her book R.E.M.--Talk About the Passion, remains the only oral history of the South's most successful alternative rock band. For 14 years she covered the legends, cult icons and future superstars of punk, folk and rock in her column The Show Goes On, for the Contra Costa Times (some of them are archived at www.contracostatimes.com). Her music reviews, profiles and reporting can be read at www.crawdaddyarchive.com  She's also completed Starry Eyes: A Novel For Young Rockers.