Barbara Neely  (b. 1941) Spilled Salt LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY Barbara Neely (b. 1941)  Barbara Neely is a novelist and short-story writer who lives and writes in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her short fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Test Tube Women (1984), Things That Divide Us (1985), Angels of Power (1986), and Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction (1990). She is the author of the award-winning Blanche White mystery novels Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche among the Talented Tenth (1994), whose protagonist, a middle-aged black domestic, is reluctantly drawn into sleuthing.