Fintushel Eliot

Eliot S. Fintushel is an American actor, educator and speculative fiction writer. He writes as Eliot Fintushel.[1][2]

Fintushel is a baker's son, born in Rochester, New York.[2][3] At nine he supposedly "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.[3]

He studied Zen at the Rochester Zen Center with Philip Kapleau and Toni Packer.[4]

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.[4][3][1] He lives between the horse stables and transmission shops behind the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California.[3][4]