As a scholar, Smith has written extensively on African-American literature and culture. Her first book, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1987), traces the influence of slave narratives on selected 20th century texts by black writers and, as she writes in the book’s introduction, “the variety of ways in which the idea of literacy is used within the tradition of Afro-American letters.” In this book, she argues that slave narrators and the protagonist-narrators of selected 20th-century novels by African-American writers “affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their own lives.” 

Her second book, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (Routledge, 1998), explores “what it means,” as Smith writes of her project, “to read at the intersections of constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Each chapter focuses on a site that might seem to engage one category of experience—race, class, sex, or gender—over and above the others. In each instance, I explore how the ostensible dominance of one category masks both the operation of the others and the interconnections among them.”

For example, in a chapter about a famous 1989 case in which a group of black and Puerto Rican teenagers were accused of raping and assaulting a white female jogger in Central Park, Smith makes the argument that the mainstream media “racialized the language by which the crime was censured,” while the black press “denied the seriousness of the crime in order to critique the ways in which the young men were represented and handled in the press and in the judiciary system.”

“The limits of each position reveal the need for a discourse that can condemn the violence and misogyny of the crime, and censure the crime as well as the criminal, without either falling back on racist language or pre-judging those who might well be innocent. What is needed is a discourse attuned to the racism that surrounds the case, the misogyny that enabled it, and the connections between the two. What is needed is a critique that acknowledges the competing claims of race and gender,” Smith writes. 

Smith’s third and most recent book, Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), is a critical introduction to Morrison’s works. Smith writes that Morrison seeks in her fiction for “ways of writing about race without reproducing the tropes of racism.

“Morrison’s insistence throughout her career that our common humanity can be found in the specificity of our individual and cultural differences seems strikingly prescient from the vantage point of the second decade of the 21st century”—when, Smith writes, many have proclaimed a new “era of post-racialism” in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election. 

“Not only is it naïve to assume that the election of an African-American president would mean the end of racism when so many markers of racial inequality still exist, but the urge to cloak oneself (or the nation) in the mantle of ‘post-race’ also betrays an eagerness, if not a desperation, to run from the history and the current state of racial formations in the nation. Those who cling to the notion of ‘post-race’ fail to distinguish between racism on the one hand and, on the other hand, discursive practices that acknowledge, analyze, and resist the mechanisms through which processes of racialization are enacted,” Smith writes.

“Throughout my career I’ve been interested in how literary and cultural forms and texts are shaped by processes of historical and social change,” Smith said. “I’m always thinking about the relationship between texts and their social and cultural contexts.”

Smith is also the co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of the third edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, published in 2014. She has two books in progress. The first is an interdisciplinary essay collection she co-edited with Adrienne Brown, Race and Real Estate, due out from Oxford University Press this fall. The second is a book she’s been working on for a while. It is, Smith said, “a study of the ways in which the memory of the civil rights movement has been invoked in contemporary cultural forms, including fiction, theater, and film”—and how, she said, “that memory acquires meaning in the context of changing race relations in this country.”

Smith is the child of two educators. Her father, W. Reeves Smith, is a retired professor of biology at Long Island University, and her mother, Josephine Smith, is a retired New York City public school teacher. “My brother, sister, and I were, and continue to be, voracious readers,” Smith said of her childhood. “We were encouraged to appreciate the cultural resources around us both in Brooklyn and in Manhattan. Our family spent a lot of time in museums and concerts and libraries. 

“My mother always loved to walk,” Smith continued. “We would explore Brooklyn neighborhoods on foot, and we would also ride subways or elevated trains, just to see what was at the other end of the line. My childhood was infused with a love of literature and of culture, and a deep appreciation of urban space.”

Smith grew up attending Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn. The pastor, the late Rev. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, was a legendary orator. His wife, the late Laura Scott Taylor, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College and the founding principal of Concord Elementary School, was one of Smith’s earliest mentors. Concord cultivated in Smith a love of learning, especially her love of language. There she developed a spiritual life that continues to sustain her.

“It has always been important for me to feel that my life has a higher purpose and that my work is a calling,” she said. “I was raised in a progressive faith tradition that celebrated our diverse talents and taught the importance of resisting oppressive forces. That tradition inspired me to listen to and for the voices of the disempowered, to value generosity of spirit, and to try to attribute the highest and the best motives to others.”

Outside of work, Smith enjoys spending time with friends, reading, walking and hiking, attending theater and movies, travel, yoga, Pilates, and healthy, simple cooking (roasted okra is something of a signature dish). Asked what she wants people to know about her outside of her job, Smith replied, “Even though I don’t always succeed at it, I try to lead a balanced life. As much as possible, I try to make time for family and friends, my spiritual life, my scholarly life, and athletic activity.”