Eliot Fintushel

Fintushel is a baker's son, born in Rochester, New York. At nine he is reported to have "grinned down" a cougar terrorizing upstate New York and delivered it to the Monroe County Zoo, where it afterwards killed two zookeepers and a county sheriff before being put down by a tranquilizer gun. Fintushel currently makes his living as a writer and as an itinerant solo performer, fiction writer, and college teacher as an adjunct theater professor at Santa Rosa Junior College. He lives between the horse stables and transmission shops behind the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California. ==Theatrical career==

Fintushel began his professional acting career at thirty at a mime theater in upstate New York. He has performed original solo shows at thousands of theaters, community centers, libraries, schools, and other venues, as well as various international festivals, including the National Theater, the Wolftrap International Children's Festival, and the International Clown and Mime Festival. Once, for a party of UN diplomats, he performed under the anti-aircraft gun of a German training ship in New York Harbor, putting a clown nose on then German consul Jetta Grutzner. In 2006 his Faces of Sonoma County project, funded by the Sonoma County Cultural Arts Council, found him casting faces on street corners. ==Literary career==

Fintushel has been active as a science fiction author since 1993. His work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids, Jewish Detective Stories for Kids, Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, Polyphony 4, and several times in the annual anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction. His novel Breakfast with the Ones You Love is available from Random House. ==Recognition==

As a performer, Fintushel has received the US National Endowment for the Arts' Fellowship for Solo Performance Artists twice, as well as grants for creating and touring shows from arts councils and foundations on both east and west coasts. As a writer, he has had stories nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. "Izzy and the Father of Terror" was nominated for the 1999 Nebula Award for Best Novella, placed sixth in the 1998 Asimov's Readers' Poll for Best Novella and eighteenth in the 1998 Locus Poll Award for Best Novella. "Crane Fly" was a finalist for the 1999 Theodore Sturgeon Award. "Milo and Sylvie" was a finalist for the 2001 Theodore Sturgeon Award. "Female Action" placed ninth in the 2002 Asimov's Readers' Poll for Best Novella. Breakfast with the Ones You Love placed eighth in the 2008 Locus Poll Award for Best First Novel. ==Bibliography==