She has written essays for New York magazine, Slate, The New Republic, and The Guardian, including a 2014 profile on Bryce Reed that was listed by The Cut as one of the 56 best pieces of non-fiction by female writers, a 2015 article titled "Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone?"
Monroe hosted a podcast for BBC Radio 5 in 2022 titled Lost at Sea and contributed a chapter to the 2020 non-fiction anthology Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession.
[1][2] She took a gap year after finishing high school, which she intended to spend travelling but when her flight to Nepal was cancelled after the September 11 attacks, she worked at a bakery and studied Spanish and photography for three months in San Miguel, Mexico.
[1] After she received her MFA in 2009, Monroe wrote for the Baltimore Fishbowl for several years, a website that had been founded by Susan Dunn, and lived in an artists' warehouse where she made extra money as an adjunct professor and by writing essays.
[1][5] Monroe began her freelance journalism career in 2014; her first big story was "Fire Behavior", a profile of Bryce Reed, a local firefighter who came to public attention after the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.
[11] Monroe contributed a chapter to the non-fiction anthology Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession edited by Sarah Weinman in 2020, titled "The Perfect Man Who Wasn't".
[16][17] The essay collection concerns four women who were affected by true crime – the heiress Frances Glessner Lee who created miniature models of crime scenes which became the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death; the film director Alisa Statman, who moved to Cielo Drive and became obsessed with the Tate–LaBianca murders, eventually writing a book about it; the landscape architect Lorri Davis who married Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three; and Lindsay Souvannarath, who met a young man online with whom she perpetrated the Halifax mass shooting plot.