Biography

M. Kristine Palmero was born in Manila, Philippines, before moving to Saudi Arabia when she was a year and a half old. Calling Saudi home until 2006, she attended international school there through ninth grade. After seeing the movie Dead Poets Society, she decided to apply to boarding schools and chose Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, sight unseen. Move-in day was only her second day in the United States.  She attended Middlebury College where she earned her B.A. in English and Film and a few years later, her M.A. in English. 

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After graduating from college, she taught English at Cushing Academy where she was also a dorm head and short-listed for the Reitman Teacher of the Year award in her fourth and final year. For twelve years, she taught English at the Wheeler School before moving to Milton Academy where she teaches English and has been a house head since 2018.

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​Ms. Palmero has talked about her experiences as an international student at Kent in all her public speaking: in her keynote “My Life in Two Samsonite Suitcases” at the Wheeler School’s all-school Cum Laude Society induction ceremony; at Milton Academy’s Amnesty International-hosted assembly about her experiences navigating her green card process; in her moderator introduction to an educators’ panel “Celebrating 60 Years of Women at Kent,” (2021); and in her two TEDx talks, “Donating Bone Marrow: A Love Story” (2022) and “What I Learned in High School About Love” (2023.) She has facilitated workshops on interracial dating at the Wheeler School and at the Asian Footsteps conference (2012). In addition, she was on a panel as part of Brown’s “Asian Abroad” consortium (2013). Two years later, she  presented “Exotification, Yellow Fever, and Emasculation” at Brown University’s second Asian and Asian American conference “E(RACE)D But Not Forgotten” (2015.) For a couple years, she wrote about her observations as a Filipino in the United States for Rappler, the Philippine news site founded by Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa. 

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She credits the continued support from the Kent community with her finding her literal and metaphorical homes in the United States. A member of Kent’s Alumni Council, she was the sole recipient of the Fuzz Foster ‘41 award in 2021, given to the class agent who did the most to promote the Alumni Fund. 

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Ms. Palmero is grateful, always, to her late father, who –  when, at fourteen years old, she asked him if she could go to boarding school –  said, without hesitating, “Yes.”