From Your Friend, Carey Dean

Lisa Knopp is the author of seven books of creative nonfiction including, Bread: A Memoir of Hunger and What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri and Platte. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Seneca Review, Creative Nonfiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, and Brevity. Knopp is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She lives in Lincoln.

When Lisa Knopp visited Nebraska's death row with other death penalty abolitionists in 1995, she couldn't have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, who'd murdered two Omaha cab drivers in 1979 and for which he was executed by lethal injection in 2018. From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska's Death Row, tells two other stories, as well. One is that of a broken correctional system (Nebraska's prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and excessive in their use of solitary confinement), and what it's like to be incarcerated there, which Moore frequently spoke and wrote about. The other is the story of how a double murderer was transformed and nourished by his faith in God's promises. Though Moore and Knopp were different types of Christians (he was a Biblical literalist and an evangelical; she is a Biblical contextualist with progressive leanings), they shared faith in God's love, grace, mercy, and abiding companionship.