“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
Denise Sullivan is a California-based writer. Editor of the San Francisco story anthology, Your Golden Sun Still Shines (2017), she’s the author of five published titles, including Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop (Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press 2011), The White Stripes: Sweethearts of the Blues (Backbeat, 2004), Shaman’s Blues: The Art and Influences Behind Jim Morrison and the Doors (2015), R.E.M. Talk About The Passion (1994) and Rip It Up: Rock ‘n’ Roll Rulebreakers (2001). Her first chapbook, Awful Sweet, was the culmination of her work as the Alley Cat Writer-In-Residence program in 2016. She has co-edited three poetry anthologies in the series, The City Is Already Speaking: The Sound of Calle 24. Her chapbook, The Rakish Tam, was published by Phony Lid Books in 2018. Len Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows (Lyon Editions, 2024) is a limited edition bound essay; a portion of its sale benefits poll watchers and voting rights organizations
Denise is an occasional contributor to Bay City News Foundation, The San Francisco Chronicle and Down With Tyranny! From 2018-2023 she was the S.F. Lives columnist at The San Francisco Examiner. The S.F. Lives project continues as a livestream discussion series at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco.
In an attempt to create a grassroots organization supporting independent bookstores in hyper-gentrified San Francisco, in 2016, Denise co-founded the United Booksellers, a coalition of bookstores and publishing professionals advocating for the worldwide preservation of literary arts and culture. She continues to work as an independent consultant and curator of community-based literary arts and cultural events, and as an educator. She is a teaching artist with The Elder Project.
Contributing to magazines, newspapers, and online resources for over 20 years as an independent music journalist and arts and culture reporter, Denise’s byline has appeared in Downbeat, Rolling Stone, MOJO and on the Internet’s very first music website, Addicted to Noise, among other print and web resources, including The All Music Guide; she wrote the music column, The Show Goes On, for The Contra Costa Times for 16 years. From 2007-2011 she was an online columnist, features writer, and music news writer for Crawdaddy!—the first U.S. magazine to cover rock music in the 1960s through a social and political lens. Her columns on where music meets social justice are also archived at Tourworthy.
After a 10-year stand in Los Angeles, she has returned to San Francisco. She is at work on several book projects and the provisionally titled, Sunnyside Up, a San Francisco-based story, incorporating prose, poetry, personal narrative and photography.
About: Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop
(Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press)
The marriage of music and social change didn’t originate with the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but never before and never again was the relationship between the two so dynamic. Political activism shaped the music, and the music spread the word, calling people to join in.
In Keep On Pushing, author Denise Sullivan presents the voices of the musician-activists from this pivotal era and the artists who followed in their footsteps to become the force behind contemporary liberation music. Through extensive research and exclusive firsthand interviews with Yoko Ono, Richie Havens, Solomon Burke, Wayne Kramer, Michael Franti, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and other icons, Sullivan chronicles the struggle that went into the creation of liberation music and how the defenders of black, women’s, and gay liberation ran headlong into suppression by the music industry as well as by the government.
Joining authentic voices with a bittersweet narrative covering more than fifty years of fighting oppression through song, Keep On Pushing defines the soundtrack to revolution and the price the artists paid to create it.
Denise Sullivan 