David Beck is a professor of linguistics at the University of Alberta who specializes in typology and morphosyntactic description, lexicography, language documentation, and Mesoamerican historical linguistics. He has worked extensively on Lushootseed archival materials and conducted fieldwork on Upper Necaxa Totonac, a minority language of Mexico. The authors of many journal articles on these two languages, Beck has also produced the Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary (2011). He is currently the North American editor of the book series Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and co-editor, with Donna Gerdts, of the International Journal of American Linguistics.

Thom Hess (1936-2009) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Victoria who worked extensively on the Salishan and Wakashan languages of Vancouver Island and northwestern Washington State. In addition to publishing extensively in the academic domain, he dedicated much of his career to the production of materials with practical and pedagogical applications for speaker communities, including the Dictionary of Puget Salish, the Lushootseed Dictionary (with Dawn Bates and Vi Hilbert), and the three-volume Lushootseed Reader series.