Description
Rex Ogle’s companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag weaves humour, heartbreak and hope into life-affirming poems that honor his grandmother’s legacy
In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence of a woman he could always count on—to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted and to offer safety when darkness closed in. Throughout a coming of age marked by violence and dysfunction, Abuela’s red-brick house in Abilene, Texas, offered Rex the possibility of home and Abuela herself the possibility for a better life.
Abuela, Don’t Forget Me is a lyrical portrait of the transformative and towering woman who believed in Rex even when he didn’t yet know how to believe in himself.
Awards
Shortlisted — ALA YALSA Award, 2023
Also By: Rex Ogle 
When We Ride: A Novel
Hardback, 2025
Rex Ogle explores bonds of loyalty and friendship and how they’re tested by drugs and violence in this propulsive novel-in-verse
Road Home
Hardback, 2024
This final, essential chapter in Rex Ogle’s memoir trilogy recounts being forced from his home and living on the streets after his conservative father discovered he was gay
Punching Bag
Paperback, 2023
The companion to Rex Ogle’s award-winning Free Lunch (ISBN 978 1 324 01694 6) is a searing account of adolescence in a household torn by domestic violence
Punching Bag
Hardback, 2021
The companion to Rex Ogle’s award-winning Free Lunch is a searing account of adolescence in a household torn by domestic violence.
Free Lunch
Paperback, 2021
Rex Ogle’s story of starting Year 7 on the free lunch programme is timely, heart-breaking and true.
