Her many accomplishments include a Guggenheim fellowship, acceptance as a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize.

Another play, based on Life According to Motown, was staged by Company One Theater in Hartford, Ct., and reviewed favorably in The New York Times.

In Priya Parmar and Bryonn Bain's article "Spoken Word and Hip Hop: The Power of Urban Art and Culture", the authors argue that Smith along with Taylor Mali and Saul Williams ushered in a new era of poetry in the film documentary SlamNation.

[4] In September 1993, Smith published Close to Death, which explores black male life expectancy in relation to homicide, drug abuse, and AIDS.

Smith's poems give voice to the thousands of black males in New York City, Chicago, and Boston who have run out of options and expect to die without first given a chance to live.

Publishers Weekly says, "Her acute ear for the intricacies of speech adds to the vitality of poems written in the voice of black men she encounters amid the inner-city squalor of Chicago and Boston.

Donna Seman from Booklist praised this collection, saying that it is "a supremely arresting and affecting match of potent images and singing words.

The collection contains poems about the urban areas of Chicago and Detroit, discussing themes of first love, Motown, personal narrative, and cultural journey.

[8] She gained notoriety when The Boston Globe asked her to resign after editors discovered her metro column contained fictional characters and fabricated events in violation of journalism practice.

[9][10] Speaking in 2015 of her subsequent career, the Globe editor who discovered her fabrications, Walter V. Robinson, noted: "The fact of the matter is that in life, for all of us, we are judged very much by how we bounce back from adversity....

For Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah she won the Lenore Marshall Prize, presented by the Academy of American Poets in recognition of "the most outstanding book of poetry" published in America the previous year.

However, The Boston Globe returned the ASNE award and withdrew her from consideration for a Pulitzer Prize after the newspaper acknowledged that some of her columns contained fabricated people, events, and quotes.