Greye La Spina was one of the few women to write regularly for the leading fantasy/horror pulps, and was a contributor to the very first issue of the first American pulp magazine devoted exclusively to tales of horror and the fantastic.

Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Methodist minister, she was a precocious child, publishing her own "small press" newspaper at the age of 10, with pages of poems and local gossip. As a teenager, she won a literary contest and had a story published in Connecticut Magazine. La Spina gave up writing to attend to her marriage and the raising of a daughter, but in her early thirties she was drawn back to it.

In the 1920s and 1930s, La Spina worked as a journalist, and she was said to have been the first female newspaper photographer. Following the death of her husband, La Spina married again, to a deposed Italian baron.