Jeanne Cooper

Jeanne Cooper has lived on Hawai‘i Island since 2019, after two decades of traveling there regularly from her previous home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She grew up in Texas, where she received a B.A. in English from Rice University, and first moved to California for graduate studies in English at Stanford University.

After deciding journalism was a better fit, she moved to the East Coast, where she worked as a copy editor and wrote arts features and reviews for the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. Jeanne later returned to Northern California and served as an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for 11 years, including five years as Travel Editor, before becoming a freelance writer in 2008.

Since then Jeanne's travel articles have appeared in the print and digital editions of nationally distributed magazines such as AAA Explorer, Hemispheres,  Alaska Beyond,  Southwest: The Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, and Sunset. She has also been a frequent contributor to Northern California magazines such as Marin, San Francisco, Modern Luxury Silicon Valley and Nob Hill Gazette. Her stories about Hawai‘i have also been published abroad in the Toronto Star, the Guardian, Wanderlust and Australia's Nine.com.au.

Jeanne has also enjoyed traveling to, and writing about, Northern California, especially Monterey, Santa Cruz, and the Wine Country; Vancouver and British Columbia; London, Stockholm, and Lisbon; Los Cabos and Mexico City; and Japan, French Polynesia, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. Early in her nearly 40-year career she contributed to guidebooks on Washington, D.C., Boston, and coastal Maine.