Where Dr. Kim Palmore is, everyone is safe.

The 59-year-old English instructor at De Anza dedicates her life to providing quality education and making her world safe and comfortable for all. Her early struggles as a poor, working class lesbian have made her an open-minded, honest and humorous person today.

“No one ever made me feel safe (in the past),” Palmore said. “(So now) I create a kind of environment that I wished for, that could have helped me”

Palmore was born into a working-class family with no college experience living in a San Diego mountain area. Amid the darkness of her life, she asked herself: “Can you figure out how to go to college?”

At age 17, she was thrown out of her house after her mother found a letter from Palmore’s 16-year-old girlfriend. She had barely graduated from high school in that winter of 1973.

After working several jobs, she settled down at Frito Lay and worked there for 19 years, where she received a murder threat from a colleague.

“The world taught me that I was not OK because of my gender expression and my sexual orientation” Palmore said.

The police saved her life then, but they were not always on her side.

Exhausted from suppressing her identity, she used to go to bars where she could be herself. But the police would break in and harass the gay people.

“Those were not easy years,” she said. “I spent most of that time trying to figure out who I was and how I would survive in a world of compulsory heteronormativity.”

Her anger toward the world dissipated as she came to accept herself, and society began to make room for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered) people.

She went back to school in 1988 after she found economic and emotional stability. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. She has been teaching English at De Anza since 2012.

Palmore became a teacher to provide students with education that helps them “challenge their (social) class, experience the world, and learn about art, music, great books and travel.”

Many students return to her class – about half of her Creative Writing students this quarter have taken one or more classes with her before.

Bomin Kim (20), an international student from South Korea, said she feels relaxed speaking English and interacting with Americans in Palmore’s class.

“She is the only professor I’ve known who speaks Korean to (me),” Kim said. “She knows something about my culture.”

Whether they are international or local, Palmore listens to her students.

“Each time students share with me, they teach me about themselves, about myself, and about the world,” she said. “Those are my favorite moments.”

Yet she does not allow students to hurt one another.

“No bullies in my class,” she said. Students who disturb her class “will be put in the wood chipper!”

Palmore’s office stands out from other instructors’. Walking in, a faint scent of coffee welcomes students. She offers them a drink.

Numerous conversations, both academic and personal, take place in this office.

Aurora Rios-Mendoza (18), a student from a family with no college experience, said she was inspired by Palmore’s words.

“Kim taught me that I deserve to be successful,” she said. “She has been through a lot … and when she gives you advice, you feel like she knows what she is talking about.”

Palmore, too, is inspired by her students and great authors.

She puts pictures and cards from her students inside a transparent “head” by her desk.

“So I can keep their thoughts,” Palmore said, smiling and stroking the head.

Her favorite lines from books, printed in black letters, run across the gray cement-like surface of the wall to her left. One says, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Susan Harding Palmore helped her decorate the office. The two got married in 2013.

Palmore has a unique quality to make everyone feel special, Susan said, although “I always feel like I’m the most important person in her world!”

Palmore said “Granting Absolution” would be the title of her own life story.

And her safe haven continues to expand today.