I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Since 2012 I've been based in Marfa, Texas where I am a contributing writer for the New Yorker, primarily covering Texas and the Southwest; previously, I contributed to Harper’s, Esquire, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Bookforum, Texas Monthly, and many others. I have written about crime, communes, utopias, small towns, firefighters, guns, sperm donors, border issues, haunted houses, and motorcycles, among other things. I hosted the BBC podcast Lost at Sea, about a missing fisheries observer and crimes on the high seas. I have been a finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists and named as one of 56 women journalists everyone should read by New York Magazine. My book, Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (Scribner 2019) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a best book of the year by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and Jezebel. My work has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2018 and Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession.

Chris O'Connell wrote a nice profile of me for the Columbia Journalism Review with a lot more information.

 I am available for freelance assignments and adventures: rachel [dot] monroe [at] gmail [dot] com. For questions about rights, permissions, and other complicated/legal things, please contact my agent, PJ Mark.