Mary Coffman

Mary Coffman is a Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC) and is licensed in both South Carolina (Licensed Professional Counselor) and Florida (Licensed Mental Health Counselor). Her career has included counseling, administration, writing, adjunct college teaching, and research. Early in her career she conducted psychological evaluations for schools and mental health clinics, and she worked with populations that included the developmentally delayed and children with emotional or behavioral problems. She was director of a parent intervention program for high-risk children. Later on she worked with children and teenagers as a family counselor and supervisor for a nonprofit agency in Florida. Her most recent work (until she retired) was as a administrator of a family literacy program/parent training program in South Carolina. Throughout her career she has taught numerous parenting classes. While an undergraduate, she worked part-time as a features writer for a newspaper. Later she became interested in the application of cognitive-behavioral principles to children’s books as a graduate student at the University of West Florida. After completing an experiment on bibliotherapy for fear of the dark for her master’s thesis, over a period of years she contributed to a series of other studies that were conducted at the University of West Florida on bibliotherapy. As an avocation during retirement, she is continuing to contribute to the field of bibliotherapy. Recently, she was senior author on a chapter with Drs. Frank Andrasik and Thomas Ollendick entitled “Bibliotherapy for Anxious and Phobic Youth” (Wiley, in press). She is currently serving as a co-investigator on an upcoming bibliotherapy study being supervised by Dr. Thomas Ollendick at Virginia Tech. She is a member of the American Counseling Association (ACA) and the American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA). She is an associate member of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT). She recently relocated from Florida to South Carolina.