He works with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say to promote poetry events, advocate for literacy/literature and organize creative writing workshops that are open to the public. He is the founder of Tintero Projects and works with emerging Latinx writers within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. His publishing credits include prose work in Houston Free Press, the Kenyon Review and Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino: Short Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and poetry that appears in Huizache, Luna Luna, Ostrich, Revista Síncope, Pilgramage, Border Senses, the Los Angeles Review of Books' newest channel, Voluble and Gulf Coast Journal. Mendez earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He has been an educator for the last sixteen years.