From a Single Seed: Fourteen Years of Grain Valley Publishing
Two 2025 honors for one Wichita audio drama. Award art: Independent Publisher Book Awards and Audio Publishers Association.
On the 2025 medalists page of the Independent Publisher Book Awards, under a red banner that reads Outstanding Books of the Year, eight covers sit in two rows of four. The last one, bottom right, shows a boy on a bicycle on a gray street.
The category is Audiobook. The title is The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline. The credit reads Grant Overstake and May Wuthrich.
The judges drew those eight from the whole field of regular entries, the books they found "the most heartfelt, unique, outspoken and experimental." All eight earned gold medals. TJ Crowley was the only audiobook among them. That same spring, in New York, it had won Young Adult at the 30th Annual Audie Awards.
Both honors went to an independent press in Wichita, Kansas, that started in 2012.
The Outstanding Books of the Year section of the 2025 IPPY medalists page. Source: Independent Publisher Book Awards, ippyawards.com.
A town you won't find on the map
Grain Valley Publishing takes its name from Grain Valley Township, the Kansas farm town Grant Overstake invented for his first novel, Maggie Vaults Over the Moon. Maggie Steele is a storybook heroine, and her township lives on the page.
He liked what the name carried. One seed of wheat goes into the ground and comes back a head of grain. Overstake believes thoughts become things, and he took the name as a good sign.
He started the press as a sole proprietor in 2012, the year Maggie first came out. Later it became Grain Valley Publishing Company, LLC.
Built from the work
Overstake left professional employment to write, and he and his wife, Claire, moved into a bungalow. From then on he lived off his creativity instead of his résumé.
Claire has worked beside him at the press from the start. She is its first reader, its editor, its proofreader and its publishing assistant. She taught science in USD 259, the Wichita public schools, and today teaches middle school science at The Independent School.
While the books took shape, Overstake taught too. He worked as a teaching artist with Arts Partners Wichita, and he substitute taught at The Independent School.
Grant Overstake and his wife, Claire, with the Audie at the 30th Annual Audies Gala in New York, March 2025.
The country story
Maggie began with a pole. On May 29, 1976, in Wichita, Earl Bell cleared 5.67 meters, 18 feet 7 inches, for a world record. Overstake caught his pole. Years later Bell gave his voice to the coach in the Maggie audiobook, narrated by Tavia Gilbert.
Kirkus Reviews called it "a fine YA novel about perseverance in sports and in life." USA Today columnist Christine Brennan called it "a warm, uplifting story for girls and the families who support them." CITIUS Mag named it one of the best track and field novels of all time, and Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi wrote the foreword.
Wichita Diocese Catholic Schools put it in their Battle of the Books, and the second edition sells at Target.com.
Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, Grant Overstake's first novel, with a foreword by Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi. Maggie Steele and her Grain Valley Township are invented.
The city story
Overstake grew up on Holyoke Street in Wichita, one block from the redline. The Real Education of TJ Crowley is set there in the summer of 1968. TJ and his neighbors are invented. The line was real, and so were the Wichita residents Overstake interviewed on both sides of it.
Grain Valley released the novel on November 5, 2018, with a launch at Watermark Books. In 2019 the Wichita Public Library chose it for its citywide Candid Conversations book club, and the Kansas Authors Club gave it the J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award. By January 2020 Dr. Jay M. Price was teaching it in History of Wichita at Wichita State.
Then it grew. Overstake and May Wuthrich adapted the novel into a full-cast audio drama, and Wuthrich directed and produced it. The production needed funding. Overstake and Wuthrich raised it together. It took four years.
The Audie Awards are the premier awards program in the United States for audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. The Real Education of TJ Crowley won Young Adult at the 30th Annual Audies in March 2025, one of 28 competitive categories, in a $2.2 billion industry.
Four of the five finalists in that category came from the audio divisions of Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House and HarperCollins. What Grain Valley brought to it was a company: co-author and director May Wuthrich, fifteen actors, and a Wichita choir.
The category went to them.
Grant and Claire with Dion Graham and members of the TJ Crowley company on the red carpet at the 30th Annual Audie Awards in New York, March 2025.
Where the seed went
The scriptbook edition, by Grant Overstake and May Wuthrich, came out in January 2026 with all 79 scenes. In August 2026 the Educational Theatre Association added it to the Thespys Approved Materials List, which lets students perform excerpts at Thespys events. A student had asked to perform it first.
Horace Mann Dual Language Magnet in Wichita built a classroom unit around it. The Real Education Project, a nonprofit fiscally sponsored by NonProfitGO, takes the audio drama into public listening programs, with support from a City of Wichita Activation Grant.
Fourteen years after the first seed went in, a boy on a bicycle sits in the corner of a page of gold medalists.
The Grain Valley Publishing shelf in 2026. Covers: Grain Valley Publishing. Award art: Independent Publisher Book Awards and Audio Publishers Association.