[2] Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia,[3] after a tumultuous childhood, Brooks became a ward of the state.
[3] After high school, she studied English and anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.
[5] While at McGill, she won the national Book City/Books in Canada Student Writing Award for poetry in 1992[5] and hosted a weekly radio show, Dykes on Mikes, on CKUT-FM.
She later became managing editor of the Vancouver-based publishing company New Star Books, and is a writing instructor at the University of British Columbia.
She has published the non-fiction books Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text (2005),[8] Wreck Beach (2007)[9] and Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces (2013),[10] and edited the anthologies Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong's Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace (1998) on her own[11] and Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions (2000) as coeditor with Brett Josef Grubisic.