Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on November 19, 1911 in Birmingham, AL and began writing poetry as a child. She later moved to Gainesville, Georgia where her father was a faculty member at the Riverside Military Academy. She attended Alabama College (now Montevallo University).

Ms. Counselman's work appeared in Weird Tales, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal and other magazines. Her stories were dramatized on General Electric Theater and other national television programs in the USA, Canada, the British isles and Australia. For example, “Parasite Mansion,” was broadcast in 1961 as part of the Thriller television series.

Her tale "The Three Marked Pennies," written while she was in her teens, and published in Weird Tales in 1934, was one of the three most popular in all of Weird Tales history. This oft-reprinted classic tells of a small town whose inhabitants awaken one morning to find anonymous notices posted throughout their city. The posts read, "During this day of April 15, three pennies will find their way into the pockets of the city. On each penny will be a well-defined mark. One is a square; one is a circle; and one is a cross. These three pennies will change hands often, as do all coins, and on the seventh day after this announcement (April 21) the possessor of each marked penny will receive a gift. To the first: $100,000 in cash. To the second: A trip around the world. To the third: Death."

Later, Counselman worked as a reporter for The Birmingham News. Counselman taught creative writing classes at Gadsden State Junior College (now the Wallace Drive Campus of Gadsden State Community College) and at the University of Alabama.

She completed a novel about witchcraft, and in 1976 received a $6000 National Endowment for the Arts grant.

The late August Derleth anthologised her poems in Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre and Fire, Sleet and Candlelight.

In later years she resided in Gadsden, AL with her husband, Horace B. Vinyard, and a large entourage of cats.

Phoenix Award, Southern fandom Confederation, 1981