Anita Sullivan

Anita Sullivan’s newest book, The Family Piano, is a collection of forty short essays first broadcast on National Public Radio’s "Performance Today" from 1989 to 1999. These essays are about piano tuning and performance; some are funny, some serious. Anita is also the author of The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament, a book on the philosophy of piano tuning which won the Western States Book Award for creative nonfiction in 1986, and I Hear the Crickets Laughing, a chapbook of poems published in 1996.

Anita was born in Boston, grew up in Florida, California and South Carolina, received an MA in English in 1970 from Clemson University in South Carolina, and has lived in Corvallis since 1981 where she tunes pianos for a living.

In 1976, she had the chance to become a piano tuner’s apprentice and immediately switched careers from teaching and journalism to full-time piano tuning. She has also written articles and lectured on early keyboard temperaments–- a concept I am sure she will explain. In addition to writing, Anita translates Greek poetry and prose. She is working on a novel about a piano tuner who tunes pianos in a haunted music building.