Tom Beveridge, a composer, singer, and choirmaster, is a major figure in Washington music. He founded two choruses, the New Dominion Chorale and the National Men's Chorus. He began his musical career at the age of four, when he began playing the piano. At age six, he was playing Haydn duets with his father. At ten, he composed his first chamber pieces. He studied music at Harvard.
DeAnne Blanton is a senior military archivist at the National Archives specializing in nineteenth-century U.S. Army records. She and Lauren M. Cook, special assistant to the chancellor for university communications at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, spent a decade researching original-source records documenting the experiences of women who assumed male aliases and served as soldiers in the Civil War.