She is most noted for her young adult novel
Tilly, a Story of Hope and Resilience, which won the
Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2014, and her children's picture book
My Heart Fills With Happiness, which won the
Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize in 2017. In 2018 she was named as a finalist for the
TD Canadian Children's Literature Award for
Speaking Our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation, and for the Burt Award for
The Journey Forward, a compilation of two novellas co-written with
Richard Van Camp. In the same year she published
Tilly and the Crazy Eights, a sequel to her first novel. In addition to her work as a writer, Smith has worked as a
psychiatric nurse in Indigenous communities for over 25 years, having completed formal nurses training at
Douglas College. She also spent 5 years working as Instructor for Curriculum Design at the Justice Institute of BC and has been an Inspirational Speaker for Little Drum Consulting for more than 20 years. == Awards ==