Dr. Amara Quamino, Chair of the Clarebourne English Department, has had an essay accepted for inclusion in The Examined Page: Contemporary Essays on African Literature, an anthology forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in spring 2025.
The essay, titled “Narrating the Gap: Adichie and the Space Between Memory and History,” grew out of a unit Dr. Quamino teaches in her Grade 11 seminar on Literature of Migration and Displacement — a course she designed for Clarebourne’s Upper School in 2014. She began drafting the piece, she says, after a student asked a question she couldn’t answer to her own satisfaction.
“A student in my seminar asked why Adichie’s narrators always seem to know more than they’re telling. I gave what I thought was a good answer in the moment. On the drive home I realized it wasn’t. The essay is basically the better answer I owe that student.”
Dr. Quamino has been at Clarebourne since 2007. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale and maintains an active writing practice alongside her teaching — something she considers non-negotiable. “I can’t ask students to take writing seriously if I don’t.”
The Examined Page will be available through University of Michigan Press from April 2025.