Author. Elizabeth's writings will lead her to be considered as one of the greatest southern authors from Alabama. During her writing career, she wrote over four-hundred short stories and poems. Elizabeth cared very little for nursery tales and begged her mother to read her horror and suspenses stories. As a child Elizabeth began writing poetry and sold her first poem at the age of 6. She attended Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) and the University of Alabama. She worked as a reporter for The Birmingham News in her early years. Most of her work was published in Weird Tales, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and over fifteen other magazines and publications. Elizabeth's first recorded professional sale was the short story "The Devil Himself", which appeared in the short-lived "Myself: The Occult Fiction Magazine" in November 1931. Her most famous story "The Three Marked Pennies" was published in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales and written when she was fifteen years old. "The Three Marked Pennies" has been reprinted over seventeen times in several different languages. In November of 1951 her first published science fiction story was “The Conquistadors Come” in Planet Stories. Her 1967 "A Handful of Silver" is believed to be one of the best Christmas ghost stories ever conceived by an American southern author. Elizabeth's stories were dramatized on General Electric Theater and other national television programs in the United States, Canada, the British Isles and Australia. Her work “Parasite Mansion” was broadcast in 1961 as part of the "Thriller" television series with Boris Karloff as narrative. Some of her stories were published under the pen names: Charles DuBois, Sanders McCrorey and John Starr (John Star was a house name used by pulp magazine publisher Fiction House for many authors). A collection of fourteen short stories of her finest work is published in the book called "Half in Shadow - A Collection of Tales for the Night Hours". Her collection of stories and poems were labeled as Fantasy Fiction and appeared over a twenty year period in the magazine "Weird Tales" until it's final issue in 1954. Her most famous poem was the "Witch-Burning" published in October of 1936 in Weird Tales. Elizabeth was Alabama's first licensed 'woman navigator'. Buying her first cabinboat "The Slip-Along" literally for a song after selling the verse the "Artisan" wrote in 1940. She married Horace Benton Vinyard on Nov 13, 1941 in Etowah County. They lived on the last surviving paddle-wheel steamboat the "Leota" on the Coosa River until the Leota sank during a thunderstorm on Mother's Day; May 13, 1945. Later in life she taught creative writing classes at the University of Alabama Extension Center in Gadsden. In 1976, Counselman was awarded a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1981, she received the Phoenix Award, from the Southern Fandom Confederation, for lifetime achievement as a southern "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy Writer". In describing her philosophy of writing horror fiction to Alan Warren, she was stated as saying, "The Hallowe'en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared".

The following list is not her complete work.

Short Stories and Poems:
The Devil Himself (1931)
Echidna (1932)
Madman's Song (1932) 
Voodoo Song (1933) 
Nostalgia (1933)
The House of Shadows (1933)
The Girl With the Green Eyes (1933)
The Cat-Woman (1933)
The Accursed Isle (1933)
The Three Marked Pennies (1934)
Witch-Burning (1936)
The Black Stone Statue (1937)
And Who’ll Be in Scotland Afore Who?(1938)
Mommy (1939)
The Web of Silence (1939)
The Gate (1939)
Twister (1940)
Drifting Atoms (1941)
Tornado (1940)
Ring Eclipse (1941)
Artisan (1941)
Routine (1941)
Parasite Mansion (1942)
The Deserter (1943)
Seventh Sister (1943)
Song for a Troubled Heart (1945)
Average (1945)
Famine (1946)
Carity (1947)
The Breeze and I (1947)
The Lens (1947)
A Death Crown for Mrs. Hapworthy (1948)
Caprice (1948) 
The Devil's Lottery (1948)
The Bonan of Baladewa (1949)
The Shot-Tower Ghost (1949)
The Green Window (1949)
The Smiling Face (1950)
The Tree's Wife (1950)
Album of Debussy (1950)
The Monkey Spoons (1950)
Cordona's Skull (1950)
Something Old (1950)
The Spirit-Tree of Ajumba (1951)
No Rain for N'Tomba (1951)
The Unwanted (1951)
Chinook (1951)
Rapport (1951)
The Conquistadors Come (1951)
Penny Wise, Fate Foolish (1951)
The Prism (1952)
Ndembo! (1953)
The Marriage-Hat of Golandi (1953)
Night Court (1953)
Way Station (1953)
Room in Darkness (1961)
Hargrave's Fore-Edge Book (1962)
A Death-Crown for Mr. Hapworthy (1964)
Gleason's Calendar (1964)
The Prism of Truth (1964)
The Hauco of Senor Perez (1964)
A Handful of Silver (1967)
Kellerman's Eyepiece (1975)
African Wood-Carving (1975) 
Gentle Reader (1977)
The Fay-Child (1977) 
Tupilaq (An Eskimo Demon) (1978) 
Healer (1980)
The Lamashtu Amulet (1980)
Return to Averoigne (1980)
Cellini's Pitchfork (1982)
The T'ang Horse (1983)
Pyramid (1983)
Wings (1985)
Baikal (1985) 
Swamp Cypress (1985) 
My Cup of Tea (1986)
Korowaar (1987)
Aided (1987) 
The Magic Three (1987) 
The Curtained Cabinet (1988)
The Summons (1988)
In Sextuplicate (1990)
Ani-Yunwiga (1990) 
Chasaph (1990)
Flashflood (1992)
Two Demons-or Three? (1994)

Other work without year:
The Night Side
Dark of the Moon
Supernatural Reader
The Sleeping and the Dead
Dark Mind
Dark Heart
Over the Edge
Travellers
Gifts With Wrappings Off
To Memory

Chapbooks:
Witch-Burning (2010)
 
Collections:
Half in Shadow: A Collection of Tales for the Night Hours. (1964 and 1978) 
African Yesterdays: A Collection of Native Folktales (1977)
Move Over-It's Only Me (verse) (1975) 
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Supernatural-But Are Afraid to Believe (1976) 
SPQR: The Poetry and Life of Catullus (1977) 
The Eye and the Hand (1977) 
New Lamps for Old (1978) 
The Face of Fear and Other Poems (1984)

Collections with other author's:
Treasury of American Horror Stories (1988)
Weird Tales: 'Seven Decades of Terror (1997)
100 Ghastly Ghost Stories (2001)
Horror Gems, Volume Four (2012)
Horror Gems, Volume Five (2013)

Reference Book Chapters and Encyclopedia Entries:
*Mary Elizabeth Counselman at This Goodly Land: Alabama's Literary Landscape
*Davin, Eric Leif. "Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911-1994)." Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006. 375.
*Ruber, Peter. "Mary Elizabeth Counselman (Essay)." Arkham's Masters of Horror: A 60th Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First 30 Years of Arkham House Ed. Peter Ruber. Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House Publishers, 2000. 301-306