​Emily Brown has lived a life that spans continents, cultures, and decades of reinvention.

 

She studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn a master's degree in international political economy at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. An academic foundation that gave her a rare lens for understanding the forces that shape families, societies, and individual lives. That intellectual curiosity carried her into eight years of immersion in a San Francisco feminist activist organization, and later into a formative year in Hungary just as the Soviet Union began its collapse. A firsthand experience of history turning that few memoirists can claim.

 

She eventually settled in Hamilton, Canada, where she raised her son with her Canadian husband, Tony. She built a career in nearby Toronto at the Canadian headquarters of banking and insurance, focused on the human side of institutional systems.

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Outside of writing, Emily is an award-winning gardener, having received several Trillium awards for her front yard perennial display, and has participated in Hamilton's annual city-wide Open Garden event.