After being enthralled by James Baldwin's novel "Go Tell It On the Mountain," she resolved to become an expatriate writer; however, due to her interest in social movements in the 1960s, she resigned herself to literature studies at home.[8] She pursued graduate study in literature in an attempt to seek out women writers of colocolor came to terms with the fact that black women were not included in the American literary canon. After reading an article in "Ms." Magazine that Alice Walker would be teaching a course on African-American women writers, Smith enrolled and vowed to teach women writers of color whenever she taught and began doing so once she received a teaching load at Emerson College in 1973.[8]