Meet Glamour’s 2020 College Women of the Year

“He told me he thought his niece would have grown up to look just like me,” she says.

The comment struck her—not that he was singling her out or that he was making a comparison between herself and his family member. It was the word thought.

“He thought,” says Smith, emphasizing the word. “He hadn’t seen his niece in eight years.” The fact of the prison system, and of life sentences—that it forces people to experience their own family members not as evolving people but as ideas—hooked into her. She couldn’t stop thinking about the children of people who are incarcerated: children whose parents disappear, for months or years, only to walk back into their life. Children whose parents disappear and never come back. Children trying to come to terms with the fact that their parents are not dead but somehow unreachable.

Smith is a doer—she was recruited to La Salle University to play on the school’s Division I golf team. She ended up serving as captain for three years. She was a member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority. She worked, throughout college, as a campus tour guide, showing prospective students and their families around the Philadelphia school’s grassy urban campus. And so the 22-year-old did what she tends to when she can't stop thinking about something: She searched for answers. 

Smith went looking for resources for these children—this class of tiny people who grow as fast and as inhumanely as America’s ever-expanding prison system. “There’s not very much on the market,” she says. She wanted to make a contribution. “I thought what better thing to do than create a children’s book to help children not feel ostracized or alone and know it’s a much more common process than people realize,” she says. When Smith was a child and a family member went through a difficult illness at a young age, she says, there were no books to comfort, or to help to confront the reality of the situation. Children's books can be extraordinary tools, but even among the crop of socially aware picture books of the last few years, not every stigmatized situation gets bound into a beautiful book. “There’s plenty that tackles the loss of a pet or divorced parents,” says Smith. “But there was nothing really that was talking about incarcerated people, or the idea of a father going away and then coming back, the reentry process.”

And so Does He Still Love Me? was born. Smith’s picture book started with tons and tons of research—reading studies and doing personal interviews with people who have been affected by a family member’s incarceration. She interviewed students at her college who had experienced a parent’s incarceration. She interviewed people in the community whose spouses had been incarcerated. 

She spoke to elementary school teachers in her home state of Indiana, who were confronting these issues on a regular basis. “Just realizing how a public school teacher might have six or seven children in their classroom who have one or more incarcerated relatives was really eye-opening to me,” Smith says. Does He Still Love Me?, which Smith wrote, illustrated, and published as a senior at La Salle, is for those kids—and for their classmates. “No one should be ostracized because of what their life is like at home,” she says. The message of the book—which follows the experience of Thomas, whose dad is incarcerated—is that his dad loves him and that his dad’s situation is not Thomas’s fault.

The book came out in February 2020. While the pandemic has disrupted some of her plans to share it with the wider world, she remains undeterred. She is donating all 2020 profits from the book to Turning Point, a domestic violence services center in Indiana, and she donated copies of her book to her local shelter, where she had planned to visit and read to children. When children return to school buildings, her books will be there. “I would really like to be able to share this book with as many children as possible,” she says.

Beyond that, Smith has a dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot. She plans to start training when the pandemic allows for it. “I’ve wanted to do it since I was like 12, and I realized I couldn’t talk myself out of it,” she says. “I’m signing myself up for a life of adventure and excitement.” —J.S.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer at Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

Mattie Kahn is the culture director at Glamour.