Smith always loved poetry, even as a child, but it wasn't until she was a sophomore at Harvard that she began writing seriously. She attended workshops and got involved in The Dark Room Collective (http://www.pw.org/content/the_dark_room_collective_then_and_now), a community of black writers who hosted a reading series. In an interview with Gulf Coast in 2004 she said of these early days "Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction."
For Smith, being a poet requires what she described in a conversation with Elizabeth Alexander as "a kind of commitment to living a certain way: to looking closely at details, to feeling things with great fervency, to never moving too far from a kind of childlike wonder and questioning." In that same conversation she discussed her process of writing as an attempt at following the plans that the poem has for itself. She said, "I try to write when I'm feeling uncertain about where I ought to be going, when the things foremost in my mind are questions and distant wishes."
She graduated with a B.A. from Harvard in 1994 and went on to get a M.F.A in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Today she teaches Creative Writing at Princeton. Smith's advice to young poets is to read poetry of all genres and eras, and not to be afraid to ask questions in poems. In an interview with The Aviary she said, "I believe that it is usually what we haven't yet come to grips with that makes for the most interesting material."
Here she is reading Duende:
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