Arvin Ram is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow and a 2022 Hemingway House Writer-in-Residence (selected by Pam Houston). He and his wife, Danica, are the owners and operators of Townie Books and Rumors Coffee and Tea House in Crested Butte, Colorado. Together, they are raising wild twin 7-year-old girls in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Arvin worked on A New West, a novel about family, memory and land that unsettles the myths of white male narratives in the west and centers indigenous, brown, and queer bodies in an increasingly inhospitable landscape beset by wildfires and drought.