About Grant Overstake

Grant Overstake is an Audie Award-winning author and former newspaperman who writes about ordinary people and the larger meaning their lives carry. A reporter by training, he tells plain stories that open into something deeper. The short version of his life is a list of credentials. The truer version begins the day he set the résumé down and followed creativity and contemplation to see where they led. That turn is the reason the books exist.

The writing showed early. Grant took his first newspaper job at eighteen, and at the University of Kansas he won the William Randolph Hearst Award, often called the Pulitzer for college journalists. He wrote for the Wichita Eagle and the Miami Herald before he turned to fiction. The reporter's habit of getting the detail exactly right never left him, and it is part of why neither novel goes soft.

His first novel, Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, follows a Kansas farm girl who takes up the pole vault after her brother's death. Kirkus praised it as a fine novel about perseverance in sport and in life, Citius Mag called it one of the finest track-and-field novels, and it carries a foreword by Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi.

His second novel, The Real Education of TJ Crowley, is set in 1968 Wichita and follows a seventh-grade boy on a newly integrated street as he confronts the racism he was raised inside. The Kansas Authors Club named it Book of the Year. Its full-cast audio drama, The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline, won the 2025 Audie Award for Best Young Adult Audiobook, the AudioFile Earphones Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards' Outstanding Audiobook of the Year.

Before the books came ten years of ministry. Grant and his wife, Claire, served together as Salvation Army officers, in the Henry Horner Homes of Chicago and in Muscatine, Iowa, through the Mississippi River flood of 1993. He then spent five years as a United Methodist pastor among farm families during the farm crisis.

In those years he picked up Thomas Merton in a Catholic bookstore, and the contemplative thread never left him. He is not Catholic, but he has long drawn from the Catholic contemplative tradition, and it runs under everything Grain Valley publishes.

Grant founded Grain Valley Publishing and The Real Education Project, a nonprofit bringing listening-centered education into schools, libraries, and community settings. Through BookLab, Grain Valley's publishing-intelligence service, he helps other independent publishers reach the readers and institutions already looking for their books.

A lifelong athlete, Grant was an All-America decathlete at Kansas. He and Claire, an award-winning science educator, still compete together in masters track and field. They sing with the ARISE Ensemble, a Wichita choir that keeps the spirituals alive; that community opened the door into the history behind The Real Education of TJ Crowley, and ARISE performs the gospel music in its audio drama.

Contact Grant Overstake