[6] She has held a number of academic positions, including: In 2017, she was appointed as poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.

The Door is a site of traceable beginnings that are left at the doorsteps, eventually forgotten and lost in historical and familial memory, as demonstrated when Brand's grandfather can no longer remember the name of the ancestral people they belong to.

This feeling of being incomplete is common among Black people throughout the diaspora and, as Brand demonstrates, and is one of the driving forces in her desire to know her ancestry.

"[20] In Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986), Brand and co-author Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta interviewed a hundred people from the Canadian Native, Black, Chinese, and South Asian communities about their perceptions of racism and its impact on their lives.

It is a 50-page tour-de-force which tackles issues of immigration, environmentalism, slavery, lesbian love, identity, place and the female body, all from a no-holds-barred Black feminist perspective.

In the Caribbean context, Brand's literary forebears had almost been exclusively male so her take in No Language is Neutral is of particular importance and her calling out of Walcott even more revolutionary.

The cover plays with the softness of themes such as love and desire but the hardened fist is there as a reminder of the difficult politics Brand is confronting in this volume.

In 1991 the critic Ronald B. Hatch wrote that the "highly provocative material" in No Language Is Neutral coupled with "the Trinidadian English" was "monotonous" and lacked "imagistic representation".

Her anger over discrimination and poverty is triggered by the recollection of living quarters made of thin cardboard with newspapers walls - barracks that depict the physical, social and psychological degradation endured by the slaves who were denied the basic human rights and freedom.

[27] Brand wrote many of the poems in her fifth book of poetry, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in response to the United States military occupation of Grenada.

[28] The Reagan Administration sanctioned the military invasion in response to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political party, the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, who became Prime Minister of the island after a coup in 1979.

Poems in the lattermost section refer directly to Grenada, including mentions of Bishop and other prominent political leaders, the island's socio-political landscape, and scenes during and after the harrowing invasion.

The poem "On American numeracy and literacy in the war against Grenada" places the occupation in the broader context of revolution and U.S. military action in Cuba and El Salvador.

Writer Myriam Chancy says Brand found "it possible ...to engage in personal/critical work which uncovers the connections between us as Black women at the same time as re-discovering that which has been kept from us: our cultural heritage, the language of our grandmothers, ourselves.

When Studio D was criticized for its lack of diversity, Rina Fraticelli, the executive producer at the time, created a program called New Initiatives in Film (NIF).

[31] It was out of this program that Brand partnered with Ginny Stikeman to create the award-winning Sisters in the Struggle (1991), a "look at Black women in community, labour and feminist organizing".

"[35] Academic J. Edward Chamberlain called her "a final witness to the experience of migration and exile" whose "literary inheritance is in some genuine measure West Indian, a legacy of [Derek] Walcott, Brathwaite and others.

'"[38] Critic Leslie Sanders argues that, in Brand's ongoing exploration of the notions of "here" and "there" she uses her own "statelessness"[39] as a vehicle for entering "'other people's experience'" and "'other places.

"[41] But, Dickinson says, "Because Brand's 'here' is necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word 'unlocatable' – her work remains marginal/marginalizable in academic discussions of Canadian literary canons.

"[42] In Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women's Writing, Charlotte Sturgess suggests that Brand employs a language "through which identity emerges as a mobile, thus discursive, construct.

"[43] Sturgess argues that Brand's "work uses language strategically, as a wedge to split European traditions, forms and aesthetics apart; to drive them onto their own borders and contradictions".

[44] Sturgess says Brand's work is at least two-pronged: it "underline[s] the enduring ties of colonialism within contemporary society";[45] and it "investigates the very possibilities of Black, female self-representation in Canadian cultural space".

[44] Italian academic and theorist Franca Bernabei writes in the preamble to Luce ostinata/Tenacious Light (2007), the Italian-English selected anthology of Brand's poetry, that "Brand's poetic production reveals a remarkable variety of formal-stylistic strategies and semantic richness as well as the ongoing pursuit of a voice and a language that embody her political, affective, and aesthetic engagement with the human condition of the black woman—and, more exactly, all those oppressed by the hegemonic program of modernity.

"[46] The editor and critic Constance Rooke calls Brand "one of the very best [poets] in the world today", and "compare[s] her to Pablo Neruda or—in fiction—to José Saramago."

The Thames Art Gallery in Chatham called Brand's documentary Sisters in the Struggle "radical in its amplifications of the voices of black Canadian women, who reflect on the legacy of the intersection of racism and sexism, alongside their personal battles in community, labour and feminist organizing".

She is also a past chair of the Women's Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and does work with immigrant organizations around Toronto.