 Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama.Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope.Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school; Dickinson's poems in particular struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir "Ordinary Light", with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory.