An Audie Comes Home to Shocker Studios
Grant Overstake, left, and Justin Rorabaugh, director of Wichita State University’s School of Digital Arts, with the Audie Award at a Shocker Studios open house held in conjunction with the Tallgrass Film Festival on Oct. 15, 2026. The statuette will stand in the studio’s trophy case.
WICHITA, Kan. — Shocker Studios at Wichita State University has an Audie Award to call its own.
On Thursday, as Wichita’s film community gathered for the Tallgrass Film Festival, Grant Overstake, author and executive producer of The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline, brought the statuette home to Justin Rorabaugh, director of the School of Digital Arts and Shocker Studios. Student engineers at the studio helped record local voices for the award-winning audio drama, which featured fifteen actors in twenty-four roles.
The full-cast audio drama won the 2025 Audie Award in the Young Adult category. Often called the “Oscars of Audiobooks,” the Audie is the audiobook industry’s top honor, given by the Audio Publishers Association. Producers of a winning title may order extra statuettes for the people most responsible for it. Overstake ordered this one for Shocker Studios.
It was a David-and-Goliath win. Backed by local supporters and an all-star cast directed by May Wuthrich, the independent Wichita production topped a field of finalists that included the audio divisions of four of the largest publishers in the world: Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.
“I can’t think of anyone who was more instrumental in getting this done than Justin Rorabaugh and Shocker Studios,” Overstake said. “It belongs there. If it wasn’t for Justin’s vision for what The Real Education of TJ Crowley could become, we would have had a lot more difficulty raising the funds we did. His challenge grant made all the difference. Opening his studio to our local performers was a great experience for everyone involved.”
Besides the Audie, the production won the IPPY Award for Outstanding Audiobook of the Year from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the AudioFile Earphones Award.
Wichita State student sound engineers Christian Pourteeyoh, front, and Jay Lie at the Shocker Studios console, where they supported the TJ Crowley recording sessions under the direction of Justin Rorabaugh.
The Shocker Studios sessions ran live, connected in real time to John Marshall Media in New York City, where most of the production was recorded. Local performers, among them Sheila Brown Kinnard, worked remotely with Wuthrich, who also produced the drama and co-wrote the scriptbook with Overstake.
An energetic crowd of Wichitans and festival visitors toured the studio and its expansion during the open house. “At Shocker Studios, we don’t chase a finish line. We set the standard,” Rorabaugh said. “Make it here!”
The Shocker Studios open house map at Wichita State University, Oct. 15, 2026.
“The students in the School of Digital Arts and at Shocker Studios can engage in high-level, award-winning production,” he said.
Students work alongside “a world-class faculty on projects that receive national recognition” while paying a fraction of what coastal schools charge, which Rorabaugh called “a true game changer in the digital media industry.” Founded in 2019, the school has already opened doors for students nationally and internationally, he said.
Shocker Studios has earned five Heartland Emmy Award nominations and won three. Robert Thomas, now associate director of the School of Digital Arts, won for “Hope in the Heartland,” a documentary on Wichita’s effort to end chronic homelessness, and Shocker Studios faculty and alumni made up much of his crew. Two students earned the other two. The Audie now shares the studio’s trophy case with all three Emmys.
Nine new faculty members joined the School of Digital Arts this fall, two of them in audio production, and Wichita State calls it the university’s fastest-growing school.
Sheila Brown Kinnard, Grant Overstake and Justin Rorabaugh at Shocker Studios during a TJ Crowley recording session. The studio gave Wichita voices a state-of-the-art room to record a Wichita story. Brown Kinnard voices Mrs. Washington, a role inspired by her own mother.
The scriptbook edition, by Overstake and Wuthrich, is on the Educational Theatre Association’s Thespys Approved Materials List, and seven free scene cuttings, The Redline Scenes, are available at grainvalleypublishing.com/forensics. Overstake is offering classroom listening sessions and production talks to School of Digital Arts faculty this year.
The story is set in 1968 Wichita, where a 13-year-old boy comes of age along the city’s redline. TJ and his neighbors are storybook characters. The redline was real, and it ran a few blocks from where Overstake grew up.
“There will be many more awards like this coming to Shocker Studios, and they will be well deserved,” Overstake said. “The best is yet to come.”
Grain Valley Publishing Company, LLC is an independent press in Wichita, Kansas.