From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska's Death Row

by Lisa Knopp

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.

164 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2022

About the author

Lisa Knopp is the author of six books of creative nonfiction.

Her most recent, Bread: A Memoir of Hunger (University of Missouri Press 2016), explores eating disorders and disordered eating as the result of a complex tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychology, spiritual, and cultural forces through research and personal story. What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte (University of Missouri Press) won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2013 and was tied for second place in the 2013 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) book awards.

Lisa’s essays have appeared in numerous literary publications including Missouri Review, Michigan Review, Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Gettysburg Review, Northwest Review, Cream City Review, Brevity, Connecticut Review, Shenandoah, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Georgia Review. Currently, she's working on a collection of essays called Like Salt or Love: Essays on Leaving home.

Lisa is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Please visit her website: http://www.lisaknopp.com/

Reviews

[Catherine Richmond]

Author Lisa Knopp weaves together her friendship with a man on death row, with information on the death penalty and Nebraska's prisons, providing an update to Helen Prejean's Death Man Walking. The journey is factual, emotionally draining, and well-written.

[Tyler Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

great book about death penalty abolition and the connection between a deathrow inmate in Nebraska and an abolitionist