A native of San Angelo, Texas,[2] Smith is Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.

[1] With Lara Vetter, Smith is editor of Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2008) from the Mellon-sponsored Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press.

[8][9] In May 2011, Smith was voted Chair-Elect of the University of Maryland Senate, and became Chair for the 2012–2013 term.

[10] The recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson, American literary history, and in new media, Smith is a founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS), for which she has served as President since August 2013.

[11][12][13][14] In 2012 Smith helped locate a photo believed to be of Dickinson, considered to be the only picture of the poet as an adult.