Ann marie Houghtailing has an ALM in American Literature from Harvard University Extension. She has delivered a TEDx Talk entitled Raising Humans and performed her critically acclaimed one woman show, Renegade Princess,in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and San Diego. Houghtailing is a visual artist and cofounder of the firm, Story Imprinting. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Daily Worth, XO Jane, San Diego Business Journal, Yahoo! Finance,and Thought Catalog.

About Little by Little: “Little by little” is the phrase my mother used to say when things were hard. Things were almost always hard. I grew up in a culture of poverty and witnessed violence, struggle, and wild resilience everyday. What I did not know was that my mother’s phrase would become a life affirming strategy. It was a map that took me back to myself when life took so much from me. From 2019–2020 four members of my family, including my mother, died in rapid succession. Their deaths would be an extension of historic and epigenetic trauma that would require me to sit inside of suffering and paint, write, and garden my way through to transformation. This collection, Little by Little, seeks to explore the universality of human suffering and how we find our way to meaning and purpose. Everyday we experience loss. The loss of innocence, youth, relationships, jobs, money, confidence, power, life, and hope are in constant play. Learning to sit inside of deep suffering can be intellectually, emotionally, and physically demanding territory that invites us to examine who we are and what we’re made of. Little by Little is a way to see, a way to suffer, and ultimately live.