[4] Montross' first book, Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, is a memoir of her time as a medical student.
[6][10] Montross received the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in 2010, using the award money to conduct research in Paris on the origins of psychiatric treatment and to begin work on a collection of poetry, tentatively titled Lunacy and Light.
[11] That project evolved into Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis, a nonfiction work that discusses mental disorders in a series of case studies.
Montross used her 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship grant award to work on a third book about mentally ill people in United States jails and prisons, titled Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration.
[15][16] In the course of her research, she studied correctional institutions in the United States and abroad, including the Cook County Jail in Chicago and Halden Prison in Norway.