[6] She attended Rusea's High School, taking A-levels in Spanish, geography and English literature, and soon after leaving in 1974, she married Brian Breese, a Welsh teacher whose name she would later adapt to Breeze.

She moved to Kingston in 1978, after her marriage ended,[6] and studied for a year at the Jamaican School of Drama,[1] where she met Michael Smith and Oku Onuora.

[5][7] She then lived for three and a half years in the Clarendon hills as a member of the Rastafarian religion, also becoming an early participant in the Sistren Theatre Collective,[1] campaigning to advance gender equality.

In April 2006, on the BBC Radio programme The Interview, Breeze gave her perspective on mental illness and advocated increased attention to the needs of people with schizophrenia who may not be given as much leeway as someone with a "talent" like hers.

[28] On the publication in 2016 of her collection The Verandah Poems, released in March 2016 to mark her 60th birthday, Breeze explained its origin to David Katz in an interview for Caribbean Beat magazine: "I got very ill in England....As a matter of fact, I had two strokes and was in a coma for five days.

"[29] Born Jean Lumsden, she married Brian Breese in 1974 (adapting his surname to Breeze)[11] and the couple had a son, before the marriage ended in 1978.

Explaining her nickname, Breeze said in a 2009 interview: In the seventies in Jamaica when we were all beginning to chant in Kingston, we all chose African names.

"[33] Carolyn Cooper wrote: Breeze has left a legacy of poems, short stories, scripts for theatre and film as well as numerous recordings of her vibrant performances that will, indeed, endure.

[39][40] In August 2018, Breeze's poem "dreamer" was among those by six poets (the others being James Berry, Kwame Dawes, Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, and Andrew Salkey) that were displayed on the London Underground in a set entitled "Windrush 70, A Celebration of Caribbean poetry" to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of the ship Empire Windrush from Jamaica in June 1948, which marked the beginning of the most significant West Indian post-World War II migration.

[41][42] In 2018, Breeze received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Leicester, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jamaican Poetry Festival,[43][44] and a silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica.