Sierra Mendez, an assistant professor of English and assistant director of First-Year Composition at TWU, earned the 2024 Charles Kneupper Award for the best article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly in 2023.

Mendez's essay about postcards from the early 1900s was used to spread a narrative about San Antonio to racially segregate the community. It worked, she says, and in the hundred years since, that segregation remains.

Mendez's research on San Antonio's history and those postcards continues, and she plans to publish the full dissertation.