[4] Chancy was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, before relocating during childhood to Quebec City, Canada, and then to Winnipeg.

Following that, she received her master's degree in English literature from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wrote her thesis on "James Baldwin and the Dissolution of the Color Line".

Chancy's third novel, The Loneliness of Angels was the 2011 recipient of the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award for Best Fiction.

Virgil Valcin, Annie Desroy, Nadine Magloire, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Anne-christine d'Adesky and Edwidge Danticat.

She published From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic in 2012 and received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Literary Criticism in 2014.