Leadership

Jackie E. Hoermann-Elliott, PhD

Director

PhD, English: Composition and Rhetoric, Texas Christian University
MA, English: Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional Communication, Iowa State University
BA, English: Language and Literature, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Hoermann-Elliott’s approach to administration, teaching and research centers around the role of well-being in the writing processes of student and professional writers, particularly in terms of embodied cognition and mindfulness.

Her first book, Running, Thinking, Writing: Embodied Cognition in Composition, was published by Parlor Press in 2021, and her scholarship has also been published in several edited collections as well as national journals, such as Composition Forum, WPA Journal, and The Journal for the Assembly of Expanded Perspectives on Learning. She attends several conferences regularly, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, where she enjoys meeting other teachers who share her ardent interest in creativity and embodiment. At TWU, she enjoys teaching first-year courses, including ENGL 1013 and ENGL 1023, professional communication courses, and graduate courses focused on rhetoric and composition theory and writing program administration.

Sierra Mendez, PhD

Assistant Director

PhD, English: Rhetoric & Writing, University of Texas at Austin, 2022
MA, Visual Arts & Design: Design & Innovation Studies, University of North Texas, 2012
BA, English: Language & Literature, Texas A&M University, 2009

Mendez is an assistant professor in rhetoric and composition. Her research pulls from visual, memory and material rhetorics to understand the engulfing epistemologies and ecologies of coloniality/modernity.

She works with mundane, mass-produced and mass-circulated texts in community-based archives to trace the materialization of colonizing narratives into civic infrastructure, particularly local constructions of race. How, in other words, settler stories in Texas were made real and the ways their realization has affected and infected communities.

Her pedagogy is invested in supporting students as power-wielding message makers moving in long histories of mattered meaning. Her research and classroom are informed by her experiences in public humanities, creating educational resources and installations for the San Antonio Public Library from archival materials. Her work has been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. You can find more information here.

Jennifer Conner

2023-2024 FYC Program Assistant

PhD candidate, Rhetoric, Texas Woman’s University
MA, Communication, Dallas Baptist University
BA, Mass Communication, Dillard University

Conner is a scholar and professor of rhetoric and composition with research interests that intersect at Black feminist rhetoric, English pedagogy, communication theory and activism. She has over 18 years of experience in education, teaching courses in English language arts, speech communication and first-year writing.

She is most interested in contributing to pedagogy concerning remedial reading and writing in an effort to narrow the gap in education for first-year college students. In addition, she has worked as a freelance journalist for several years, writing articles focused on the African-American community throughout New Orleans and Dallas. As a scholar, she seeks to gain more nuanced skills, intermeshing what she’s ascertained in scholarship to more public sites of learning, in order to be more constructive in discourse communities focused on social reform while using an intersectional perspective. She is working on a study analyzing the communication self-efficacy of Black women English educators in Texas classrooms.

Hannah Diaz

First-Year Composition and Write Site

BA, English, Texas Woman’s University

A proud TWU alumni, Diaz received her BA in English literature in 2019. After a few years of career exploration, including a couple of years of making ice cream and decorating cakes, she returned to work for her alma mater in summer of 2023. As senior secretary, she splits her time between working with the Write Site and the First-Year Composition program.

To Diaz, a solid foundation for writing and communication is immensely valuable for any academic endeavor, career field, or life situation. Diaz is honored to be a part of helping TWU students build a writing foundation that will help them thrive in college, in their careers, and beyond. She will be starting the MA program for English Literature at TWU in Fall 2023. Although she has a range of academic interests, she hopes to focus her graduate studies on the presence of trauma in literature. Her intrigue for the topic sparked while taking Literature in Genocide as an undergraduate with Ashley Bender, PhD, in Spring 2018. Diaz hopes to teach college-level English someday while continuing to be a life-long learner of literature and writing.

Past FYC Leaders

Desirée Thorpe

2022-2023 FYC Program Assistant

PhD candidate, Rhetoric, Texas Woman’s University
MA, English, Angelo State University
BA, English, McMurry University

Thorpe is an experienced First-Year Composition instructor, and received the 2022 J. Dean Bishop Excellence in Teaching Award. Thorpe is invested in acknowledging students’ in and out-of-school literacies and integrating digital literacies in writing courses to support students. Her research focuses on the intersections of digital literacies, affinity spaces and gamification. She has a forthcoming chapter in Gamification in The Rhet/Comp Curriculum about supporting first-year writers by adapting video game affinity spaces, specifically from Dark Souls III. She presented at NeMLA (2018) explaining how to implement anime in first-year writing courses, and she was accepted to SWPACA(2020) to expand on utilizing gamification in writing courses. Thorpe is also invested in the well-being of graduate students and is working on a project that addresses bereavement in graduate school.

Mike Fraley

2019-2020 FYC Program Assistant

PhD, Rhetoric: Texas Woman’s University
MA, English: Tarleton State University
BA, English: Tarleton State University

Fraley has been teaching FYC and English courses for eight years. In addition to teaching FYC courses, Fraley was also writing center tutor and supervisor at Tarleton State for three years prior to coming to TWU. He has experience teaching Basic Writing; 1013 and 1013 Supplemental; 1023 (online and face-to-face) and 1023 Digital Composition in the Digital Composition Lab; and second-year Short Story courses. Fraley won both the 2018 J. Dean Bishop Excellence in Teaching Award as well as the Graduate Teaching Assistant Award of Excellence in 2019. His research interest focuses on multiliteracy and multimodality.

Amanda Oswalt

2019-2020 Co-Program Assistant

PhD, Rhetoric: Texas Woman’s University
MA, English: Texas Woman’s University
BA, English: Philosophy minor, Texas Woman’s University

Oswalt has been teaching in higher education for over 10 years. Her teaching assignments have included Basic Writing, Composition l and ll, Introduction to Literature, and Introduction to Literature by Women. Amanda is a past recipient of the J. Dean Bishop Excellence in Teaching Award, and her students consistently give her high praise in evaluations. Oswalt’s research interest in gender and politics informs her teaching of both writing and literature, and she is currently working on her dissertation which focuses on the rhetoric of First Ladies.