[3] Sullivan would graduate from USF with a degree in media studies, and went on to several roles in the music industry, including club DJ, publicist for 415 Records, and record-store owner.
Working as an alternative-music marketing manager for Warner Brothers Records, touring throughout the southeast with bands including Faith No More and Jesus and Mary Chain, gave her an insider perspective on the music business.
tenure included Bettye LaVette, Yoko Ono, Van Dyke Parks, Richie Havens, Janis Ian, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Solomon Burke.
Post-Crawdaddy!, she freelanced for the music magazines Paste and Blurt, and contributed an article on Tjinder Singh to the activism website Stir to Action.
As a history and analysis of roots, blues, jazz, disco, punk and hip-hop, the book focuses on popular music as a force for social transformation.
Through oral history and historical research, Keep on Pushing is a guide to the music that gave rise to the black power movement, which is further linked to the gay rights and feminism.
Being a self-confessed “record geek,” Sullivan found her book's storyline in American music, noting, in a quote attributed to Odetta, “you can either lie down and die, or insist on your own individual life.
David Ensminger, of PopMatters, praises Sullivan's focus on women musicians linked to the civil rights movement, noting that “…Odetta and Nina Simone, hold sway and never surrender; even Billie Holiday, often associated with a bygone generation, provides her Strange Fruit as a kind of template, a way to ignore simple plaintive sentiment and jazz-spiel in favor of concerns for justice and a probe of history, with all the pain intact.” Ensminger points out that the book is not “…an all-inclusive, push-button reference,” but serves “to examine the oft-overlooked underdogs whose work is powerful and challenging.”[8] More reviews: A pleasing survey of soul music, from Lead Belly to Johnny Otis to Michael Franti to Louis Farrakhan...Sullivan offers a welcome exploration of how African-American popular music became America’s vernacular.
Sullivan was the editor and contributed to "Your Golden Sun Still Shines: San Francisco Personal Histories and Short Fictions" (Manic D Press, 2017), an anthology of writings about the city under pressure of gentrification.