Born in Greece, Broumas moved to the USA when young and attended the University of Pennsylvania where she gained a BA in architecture in 1970. She then went to the University of Oregon to do creative writing. She has held several fellowships (National Endowment for the Arts 1978; Guggenheim 1981). and taught in a number of universities and colleges.

Her first work to be published in North America, Caritas (1976), is a collection of five unbound broadsides about one woman's love for another. This has established Broumas firmly within a lesbian literary tradition. Subsequent collections do not focus as clearly on lesbian relationships. She has also translated poetry from greek into English.