Libby Copeland

Libby Copeland is an award-winning journalist and author who writes from New York about culture, science, and human behavior. As a freelance journalist, she writes for such media outlets as The Atlantic, Slate, New York, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The New Republic, Esquire.com, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Glamour. Her book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, explores the rapidly evolving phenomenon of home DNA testing, its implications for how we think about family and ourselves, and its ramifications for American culture broadly.

As a staff reporter and editor for The Washington Post for 11 years, she wrote feature stories from the 2008 presidential campaign trail, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and the 2005 Michael Jackson trial, and she edited the newspaper’s television coverage. She has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR as an expert on topics that she has covered, and she has been a guest speaker many times on writing and reporting.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she was a 2010 media fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Her article for Esquire.com, “Kate’s Still Here,” won Hearst Magazines’ 2017 Editorial Excellence Award for “reported feature or profile.” She previously won first prize in the feature specialty category from the Society for Features Journalism (then called AASFE). She lives in Westchester, NY, with her husband and two children.