Ruth Ann Dailey writes columns for the Post-Gazette and composes local-interest Sunday crosswords as "The Pittsburgh Puzzler." Her essays and articles have appeared in National Review, Gramophone and other magazines, and her honors include the Clarion Award for opinion writing from the Association for Women in Communications.

Dailey is a classical pianist by training and a gospel pianist by birth, playing keyboards at her minister father's large Baptist church from the age of 12. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Maryland-College Park in 1984, studying on a National Merit Scholarship, a Chancellor's Scholarship and the Theodore Presser Music Scholarship. She continued graduate work in chamber music in Lyon, France, with a Rotary Foundation International Scholarship.

The music education led to a budding journalism career when she became a concert reviewer and features writer in Erie, Pa., in 1988, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Saginaw (Mich.) News a year later. She joined the Post-Gazette in July 2000.

Dailey has worked for almost 20 years in local talk radio and television. Currently she can be seen as a regular host of PCNC's "Night Talk."

Dailey lives on Pittsburgh's North Side, where she is turning a 100-year-old shoe polish factory into a home and a mechanic's parking lot into a city garden. With the help of her husband, three teenagers and beagle, the project's targeted completion date will probably coincide with its bicentennial.