Brown was born on September 6, 1978, in El Paso, Texas, to a mixed-race couple who met at Clemson University in South Carolina.

"[8] Brown has supported Democratic candidates in presidential elections, encouraging her readers to vote for Joe Biden[9] and Barack Obama.

[18] Brown previously contributed to Detroit-based newspaper The Michigan Citizen and was a sex columnist for Bitch magazine.

In 2013, she received a Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler-based science fiction writing workshops.

[5] In 2015, she collaborated with Walidah Imarisha and Sheree Renee Thomas to edit and release Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, a collection of 20 short stories and essays about social justice inspired by Butler.

[4][24][25] Her first book, Emergent Strategy, which examines sustainable social change, was released in 2017 by AK Press to critical acclaim.

[28] Emergent Strategy has given way to a series of books published by AK Press on sustainable transformative justice, including the November 2020 release We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice and Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, released May 2021.

[29][30] The 2020 book We Will Not Cancel Us considers questions of harm, accountability, and transformative justice, speaking primarily to an audience of activists and others organizing around prison abolition.

[16][17] Brown has contributed to many anthologies focused on justice, transformation, and feminism, including How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office: The Anti-Politics, Un-Boring Guide to Power (2004), Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement (2012), Dear Sister (2014), and Feminisms in Motion (2018), How We Fight White Supremacy (2019), and Beyond Survival (2020).

By posing this question we may understand that grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, and loneliness explain peoples’ actions.

However, had we believed the first woman who came forward and told her story vis-à-vis Cosby, potentially 40 other rapes could have been prevented.

Thus, Brown stresses the need to identify perpetrators of harms, to prevent them from re-offending, and "ensure they experience interventions that transform them".

[39] Third, Brown suggests that we ask ourselves "how can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)?"

According to Brown, this question is crucial in the age of social media where "we can make our pain viral before we even had the chance to feel it".

She writes that mainstream takedowns and public shamings often happen even before we’ve gotten the facts, which is equally true for interpersonal grieving.

For these reasons, Brown suggests trying to get mediation support, thinking of the community, and seeking justice, to address conflict.

[41] Brown's anthology Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good was released in February 2019,[42] According to Catherine Lizette Gonzalez, on the news site ColorLines, the book "demonstrates how activists can tap into emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression".

[21] The book appeared in April 2019 on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction, where it reached number six.