Press published Neal’s second volume of poetry,
Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts, which includes
works that extend Neal’s interest and presentation
of topics related to African-American culture, es-
pecially folklore and jazz. Although in general his
works received relatively little critical attention,
Neal’s poetry was frequently published in literary
magazines and edited collections during the Black
Arts Movement.
In addition to writing poetry and essays, Neal
wrote two plays, A Glorious Monster in the Bell of
the Horn and In an Upstate Motel. He also wrote
short stories, including “Sinner Man Where You
Gonna Run To?,” which appeared in Black Fire.
Neal cowrote and helped produce television
scripts as well, including Lenox Avenue Sunday
and Deep River, which aired in 1966 and 1967,
respectively. Also, between 1963 and 1976, Neal
taught at or served as a writer-in-residence at sev-
eral universities, including City College of New
York, Wesleyan University, and Yale University; he
served as executive director of the Commission
on the Arts and Humanities in Washington, D.C.,
from 1976 to 1979.
Larry Neal died of a heart attack in 1981. His
selected works, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black
Arts Movement Writings, were published posthu-
mously in 1989. Neal’s writings have been anthol-
ogized in several recent collections, including The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature,
Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American
Poe t r y, and African American Literary Criticism.
By the time of his death, Neal had revised some
of his earlier positions on art and artists and cri-
tiqued the shortcomings of the Black Aesthetic as
he continually sought to develop “new spaces” for
interpreting African-American expressive culture.
Ultimately, however, Larry Neal’s critical and cre-
ative works testify to the vitality of the Black Arts
Movement and to the promise of multigenre Afri-
can-American writers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Larry Neal: A Special Issue Callaloo, 23 (Winter
1985).
Howard Rambsy IINeely, Barbara (BarbaraNeely)
(1941– )
Born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, BarbaraNeely
(who spells her name as one word) has crafted a
career of literary achievement and community
activism. Since earning a master’s degree in urban
and regional planning from the University of Pitts-
burgh in 1971, she has been active in causes pro-
moting social justice. Among these activities, she
has organized shelters for formerly incarcerated
women; served as director for Women for Eco-
nomic Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization
for low-income women; helped found Women of
Color for Reproductive Freedom; and worked on
behalf of the YWCA and Head Start. For her ac-
tivism Neely has received the Community Works
Social Action Award for Leadership and Activism
for Women’s Rights and Economic Justice, the
Fighting for Women’s Voices Award from the Co-
alition for Basic Human Needs, and the Woman
of Courage and Conviction Award for Literature.
Additionally, she has worked as a radio producer
for African News Service and as a staff member
of Southern Exposure Magazine. She is also host
of Commonwealth Journal, a radio interview pro-
gram in Massachusetts.
Neely grew up loving the works of writers like
TONI CADE BAMBARA and ZORA NEALE HURSTON,
who offered tales of assertive black women. She
explains that her writing career began in earnest
after she encountered an old woman dancing in
San Francisco. The dancing woman “started point-
ing to people, and when she turned and pointed
to me, it seemed to me that she was saying, ‘Do
it today, because today is all you have’ ” (McNaron
and Miller). That charge seems to be the motto of
the main character of Neely’s best-known detec-
tive novels.
In the four volumes of her Blanche White mys-
tery series, BarbaraNeely presents a working-class
hero who is as unconventional in her personal
life as she is in her approach to solving crimes. In
Blanche’s fictive world, race is primary. So too are
her own distinctive African-American and femi-
nist ways of knowing, which she uses to uncover
the racial and gender hypocrisies of both blacks
and whites, as well as the scarring pretensions ofNeely, Barbara 389