In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “America’s Brutal Racial History Is Written All Over Our Genes,” Libby Copeland writes: “The debate around race consuming America right now is coinciding with a technological phenomenon — at-home genetic testing kits — revealing many of us are not who we thought we were. Some customers of the major DNA testing companies, which collectively have sold 37 million of these kits, are getting results that surprise them.”
We talked with Libby Copeland, author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, last year. The book is coming out soon in paperback. We’ll check back in with Libby Copeland today.
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. 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.
