Former U.S. Secretary of State -- and former Stanford University provost -- Condoleezza Rice has agreed to a three-book arrangement with Crown Publishers, starting with a memoir of her White House years, the Associated Press has reported.

The deal is worth at least $2.5 million, according to publishing officials who spoke to the press agency.

Rice served as national security adviser and then secretary of state to President George W. Bush and is preparing to return to the Stanford campus as a political science professor. She also holds an appointment at the Hoover Institution.

Rice was provost at Stanford during the 1990s but left that post to become an adviser to Bush when he was gearing up for his presidential campaign in 1999/ She was appointed national security adviser after his election in 2000.

Rice's memoir of her White House years will be published in 2011.

"Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House and as America's top diplomat, and her role in protecting American security and shaping foreign policy during the extraordinary period from 2001-2009," according to a statement released Sunday by Crown Publishing.

Rice, 54, will also write a memoir of her family, planned for 2012, along with a young-adult version of that memoir. Rice grew up in a segregated community in Birmingham, Ala.

Her family memoir will describe her "upbringing in the context of extraordinary efforts made by her parents and other people in the community to raise their children against a fading backdrop of Jim Crow (segregation) laws and emergent civil rights initiatives," according to Crown.

-- Don Kazak