Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911–1995)

Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on a plantation in Birmingham, Alabama. She began writing poetry as a child. The family later moved to Gainesville, Georgia, where her father became a faculty member at Riverside Military Academy. She attended the University of Alabama and Alabama College (now Montevallo University).
Her first published short story, "The Devil Himself," ran in the November 1931 issue of Myself: The Occult Fiction Magazine.
She contributed stories to Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and other popular magazines. She remains best known for her 30 horror and fantasy short stories that appeared in the long-running American pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. Some of her stories also were dramatized for television in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

In 1941, she married Horace B. Vinyard, with whom she had a son, and they settled in Gadsden, living on a houseboat on the Coosa River. In addition to fiction writing, she worked as a reporter for The Birmingham News and taught creative writing at Gadsden State Junior College (now Gadsden State Community College) and at the University of Alabama.

In 1976, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1981 she won the Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement as a southern science fiction or fantasy writer. Her poems appeared in the pioneering anthologies Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947)) and Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1961).