As summer winds down and fall beckons, The Porch will welcome our second group of writers-in-residence to Rivendell in Sewanee, Tennessee. Applications for our next round of Rivendell Residencies will open soon. Meet the six talented writers who will come together on the mountain for a week of quiet, concentrated time to work on their projects:
Adrienne Garrison is a writer, educator, and podcaster based in Bloomington, Indiana, where she lives with her husband and three children. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her essays and fiction have appeared in publications such as Literary Mama, Coffee+Crumbs, LETTERS Journal, and You’re In Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up. Influenced by the beauty of the Midwestern landscape she calls home, Adrienne seeks to uncover threads of redemption hiding in every story. She is also the co-host and producer of the podcast “Worlds Within: The Art of Place-Based Storytelling.”
Adrienne will be spending the residency working on the early draft of her second novel, a story about ambition, love, and the complicated bond between a mother and daughter. As a mom of three, she's grateful for the chance to immerse fully in the world of the book, building momentum she can carry back into everyday life.
Theo Hall is an artist and designer living and working in Nashville, Tennessee. Their multimedia storytelling project Young World has been performed as a part of the Mirror House Reading Series and Kindling Arts Festival. Their film work has been a part of Kindling X Defy GENDERBEND: Poetry Into Film and their comics have been published in SWING and Bluestem. They also serve as the art director for April Gloaming Publishing and an art editor for Waxing and Waning. They share drawings and musings on thattheohall.substack.com.
Theo is working on a short story collection that is a part of a larger multimedia project called Young World. These stories explore the larger world and inner lives of Young World’s villagers in their day-to-day lives as the first people on earth.
Kelly Heyen lives with her family in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work can be found in The Journal, Hunger Mountain, Hypertext Magazine, and Stonecoast Review. She was a finalist for the North American Review 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Prize and Fugue Journal’s 2026 prose contest.
Kelly tells us, “I primarily write short fiction, but during my stay at Rivendell I plan to focus on prewriting and drafting for a longer piece (novella or novel) that expands on an existing short story I workshopped during a multiweek fiction cohort last year. (Shoutout to fabulous Porch instructors Whitney Bryant and Adria Bernardi!)
Natasha Kamrani is based in Nashville, Tennessee. She writes: “I have a really great job, a terrific husband, two seemingly healthy and thriving adult children and wonderful friends from all phases of my life with whom I remain close. I also have a million stories swirling around in my head that want to bust out onto paper and my failure to give them a proper outlet brings enormous misery to an otherwise joyous life.
I am working on a personal essay about a recent family trip. The effort here is to bust the boundaries of my typical word count and story arc and get a little deeper.”
Rebecca Rose Mooradian lives in an old farmhouse in the heart of Nashville, Tennessee. Her debut picture book, Rose by the Sea, has received starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, BookPage, and School Library Journal. When she's not inn-keeping, chasing after her kiddos, or gardening, she's writing words and music about how much she loves the world. She is represented by Courtney Donovan at Writers House.
Rebecca tells us, “I will be working on completing Odelia, an atmospheric debut novel that explores the tension that comes from honoring the stories and places we inherit as we forge new, disparate identities. When her family home is set to be razed for the creation of a new lake, Odette returns to the house she shared with her mother, before her disappearance; what can be saved and what will be revealed when the waters rise?”
Tyquan D. Morton, a Charleston, South Carolina native, is a literary artist and filmmaker whose work moves between poetry, multimedia installation, and film to explore collective memory, communal intimacy, and the living traditions of the Black American experience, especially as a way to understand how those along the Atlantic have long turned to nature, land, and water as sites of navigation, resistance, and spiritual knowing. His work has been featured at the International African American Museum, the Gibbes Museum, the Avery Research Center, and other galleries and museums in the Southeast.
Tyquan will be working on a series of sonnets that explore Black ecology and the intimacies of care across place and lineage. Time at the residency will be dedicated to deepening the collection’s narrative arc with hopes of turning it into a short poetic film.
