WASHINGTON - WEEKS before leaving her job as a globe-trotting chief US diplomat, Dr Condoleezza Rice said on Monday she is looking for a new home near Stanford University in northern California.

'I have a place to live temporarily,' said the secretary of state who will resume her academic career at Stanford, near San Francisco, after George W. Bush hands the White House over to Barack Obama on January 20.

'I have not really had time to look and so when I get out to California, I will start looking for a place to live,' she said in an interview.

'But I know I will not live too far from where I work, because I am not a commuter by nature,' Dr Rice said.

For eight years under President George W. Bush, first as national security adviser and then secretary of state, she lived at the Watergate complex in Washington, just a few hundred yards (metres) from her State Department office.

Dr Rice is due to take up her new post at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a research center specialising in international relations. She was teaching at Stanford when the Bush administration brought her aboard in 2001.

She plans to write two books, one a tribute to her African American parents at the time of the racially-segregated south and the other on international affairs.

'I will write a book on foreign policy as every secretary of state is obliged to do,' she said.

But the second one might have to simmer for a while because it 'has been such a turbulent time and such a consequential time that it may take a little reflection,' she added.

'I want to write a book about my parents who were incredible people and emblematic really of a whole generation of black parents who just were not going to let their children be held hostages to segregation,' Dr Rice said.

'And so they just invested and invested and invested. And so I want to write about that,' said Dr Rice, the only child of a couple from Alabama and the first African-American female secretary of state. -- AFP