Libby Roderick: singer, songwriter, recording artist, & director of the Difficult Dialogues Initiative

Send us Fan MailLibby Roderick is a singer, songwriter, and recording artist, who was born in Anchorage just before statehood. Her father Jack Roderick was the last mayor of the borough of Anchorage prior to the unification of the municipality in 1975. Libby recorded her first album in 1990 which included the song, “How could Anyone,” which has been featured on CNN, CBS, and the Associated Press. Her music has been featured at the U.N. Conference on Women, with Coretta Scott King and Walter Cronkite in Washington D.C., and played on Mars by NASA. Libby has also been the director of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative since 2006; through that initiative she has helped reinforce and protect civil discourse at centers of higher learning and beyond. According to former UAA Chancellor and governor of Alaska Sean Parnell: “Libby’s work is a critical keystone in the university’s service to students and to Alaska. The democracy-threatening polarization of the American public, social media’s influence on our inability to find common ground, and the difficult but necessary discussions related to human dignity and educational access have combined to maker her leadership paramount to meeting the mission to the university.”