I was messing around with some of the examples and I couldn't figure out why my name wasn't kerned properly, until I dug around enough and found out that Pillow requires a package called libraqm to be installed to use the kerning specified by the ttf and otf files. Once I installed it, the weird kerning between the A and V in my name was fixed, as seen below.
Bad Kerning:

Proper Kerning:

Relevant package: https://github.com/HOST-Oman/libraqm
If you wanted, you could even add an argument to the pixelhouse text class to turn kerning (or any TTF/OTF font feature on or off)