The Bear Comes Home

Rafi Zabor (born Joel Zaborovsky, 1946) is a Brooklyn-based American novelist, music journalist, and jazz drummer who graduated from Brooklyn College and worked as a jazz critic and editor for Musician magazine starting in 1977. His debut novel, The Bear Comes Home (1997), about a saxophone-playing bear in the jazz world, won the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His second book, the memoir I, Wabenzi (2005), received mixed reviews, and he later received a 2008 NEA Literature Fellowship.com