STC Houston will hold its annual election starting Monday, June 3, 2019.
If you would like to nominate a chapter member for office, please send an email to Cindy Pao. Include the candidate’s name, contact information, and office for nomination.
The following candidates are running for office of the Society for Technical Communication, Houston chapter:
For President: Lara Tellis
Lara Tellis joined STC in 2009 as a student in the Master of Arts in Professional Communication program at Clemson University. She moved to Houston in 2010 and has served on the Admin Council for STC Houston since 2014. Her roles on the Admin Council include Treasurer and Vice President. Lara is also an active member of the Technical Editing Special Interest Group and has served them as secretary and hosted several of their water cooler chats.
Lara is currently working as a Technical Writer with Emerson. She looks forward to continuing to serve STC Houston in the 2019-2020 year and hopes to involve more STC members in the Houston, Austin, and San Antonio areas in our monthly events.
For Vice President: Alan Porter
Driven to educate, inform, and entertain through content, Alan J. Porter is an industry leading Content Strategist. Author of “The Content Pool,” and regular conference speaker, workshop leader, and writer on Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Customer Experience, Brand Management, and Content and Localization Strategy.
Named one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers and a Digital Strategy thought leader in 2016 and 2017.
Noted as an industry thought leader and a catalyst for change with a strong track record in developing new ideas, embracing emerging technologies, and introducing operational improvements.
For Secretary: Trena Erdelt
Trena Erdelt is a Technical Writer at Fiserv. She began her career in technical communications in 1997. Trena was previously active in the Houston STC community, including serving for two years on the Admin Council.
For Treasurer: Jennifer Shumate
Jennifer Shumate is a lone technical writer for the OneSync® software suite, a drilling engineering software package for planning and monitoring wells. Jennifer is deeply passionate about using technical communication to improve the user experience. She has ten years of experience in the technical communication field, and she’s spent the last seven years pushing MadCap Flare to its limits. Before joining Weatherford, she worked at Shell Trading and Borland Software. She earned a B.A. in English from Texas State University, and she was a judge for the 2016 STC Regional Competition for the Houston-NYC region. She has also spoken at the 2018 and 2019 STC Summits. She is a senior member of STC and belongs to the User Experience SIG.
For Director: Todd Breeding
Todd Breeding is a Technical Information Manager at Texas Instruments, a Senior Member of the Society for Technical Communication, and has a B.S. in Professional Writing from UHD. His current focus is on evangelizing about content strategy, content delivery, and the evolving SME authoring use case. During the week you might find Todd watching webinars from The Content Wrangler on BrightTALK, but the weekends are made for mowing grass and fishing. Having down time on the weekends is a key part of his content strategy. He is currently reading the Accidental Taxonomist, but likes to split his reading time between post apocalyptic science fiction and anything related to technical communications. Long live the Oxford comma!
For Director: Yvonne Wade Sanchez
Yvonne Wade Sanchez is an award-winning writer, educator, designer, and community volunteer. She works as the VP of communication for a cybersecurity company in Houston, she teaches technical writing at the University of Houston – Downtown, and she serves on the board of the League of Women Voters of Fort Bend .
For Director: Miriam Williams
Miriam F. Williams is a Professor of English at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. She received a B.S. in Economics and M.A. in Public Administration from the University of Houston, M.A. in Technical Communication from Texas State University, and Ph.D. in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University. Prior to her career in academia, she worked as a health and safety inspector, policy analyst, policy editor, and program administrator for State of Texas regulatory agencies. Her work in government agencies informs her teaching and research, which focus on public policy writing, intercultural communication, and ethics in technical communication.
Miriam has published journal articles on plain language, public policy writing, and intercultural communication in the field’s most prominent journals, including Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Programmatic Perspectives. Her books include the co-authored textbook, Writing for the Government, her monograph, From Black Codes to Recodification: Removing the Veil from Regulatory Writing, and her award-winning co-edited collection, Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identify in Technical Communication.
From 2013-2018 she served as Director of the M.A. in Technical Communication Program at Texas State. In 2017, she was the first person of color elevated to Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.
For Immediate Past President: Erika Frensley
Erika Frensley has been involved with STC Houston for over two decades. She has worked as Competitions Manager, Banquet Manager, Competitions Judge, Satellite Director, and Webmaster. For the past three years she has been Chapter President.
