Jean Libby

Jean Libby is a retired instructor of U.S. History and Ethnic Studies at community colleges in northern California. She has written, edited, and photographed widely on John Brown the abolitionist since 1978.

Jean and Ralph Libby (a retired librarian, now deceased) lived in Palo Alto, California, since 1964. Jean remains in the family home in the Rinconada Cultural Park neighborhood.

After completing a Professional Photography A. A. degree in 1978, she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, as a re-entry student, completing her B.A. in Social Science / African American Studies in 1986. Jean was awarded a President's Undergraduate Fellowship at the University of California to document her thesis on John Brown, "Mean To Be Free: John Brown's Black Nation Campaign" for the cable classroom series. She holds an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University, receiving the Outstanding Graduate Student award at the School of Ethnic Studies in 1991.

The Vietnamese dissident poet Nguyen Chi Thien asked Jean Libby for help in reaching a wider world (English-speaking) in October 2004. They worked together creating an autobiography for the Viet Nam Literature Project by Dan Duffy (2005) and the translated Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories, Monograph #57 published by Yale Southeast Asia Studies in 2007.

Poet Thien, who was imprisoned by the Communist government of Vietnam for 28 years between 1961 and 1991, became a legend and hero after he bravely dashed his manuscript of poems composed in his mind during imprisonment to the British Embassy in Hanoi in 1979. Finally released after international outcry in 1991, the author emigrated to the United States in 1995. He passed away in Orange County, California, in 2012. Photographs of Nguyen Chi Thien taken by Jean were published with his obituaries in The New York Times, Associated Press, and The Economist.