Tavia Gilbert co-produced the drama and plays TJ’s mother
Publisher’s note: this is one of fifteen short pieces introducing the actors of The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline. Fifteen actors, twenty-four roles, nine hours of audio. One actor at a time, with a clip to hear.
MEET THE CAST · No. 5 of 15
Tavia Gilbert has been a longtime supporter of this work. She was an early reader of The Real Education of TJ Crowley while the novel was still a manuscript, and she offered support and guidance along the way. After Grant Overstake and May Wuthrich adapted the novel into an audio drama, Gilbert came back to co-produce it with Dion Graham and to star as the voice of Kate Crowley, TJ’s mother.
The scriptbook’s cast list calls Kate “TJ’s bigoted, unstable mother,” and her fear of the family next door sets the story in motion. Gilbert also reads the Introduction and Acknowledgments, so listeners hear her own voice before they hear Kate’s.
Gilbert has narrated and directed more than 1,000 audiobooks. She won the 2017 Audie Award for Best Female Narrator for Be Frank with Me, and she founded Talkbox Productions. In the full-cast Charlotte’s Web narrated by Meryl Streep, a 2020 Audie winner, she voices the Goose opposite Dion Graham’s Gander, with Johnny Heller and Kirby Heyborne in the cast as well. Graham, Heller, and Heyborne all perform in TJ Crowley too.
Her work with Grain Valley Publishing began before TJ Crowley. She is the voice of Grant Overstake’s novel Maggie Vaults Over the Moon.
The clip to hear comes from Scene 61. Detective Harris, voiced by Ari Fliakos, comes to Kate’s door asking about Raymond Hatcher. She pours him coffee and answers with charm while TJ listens from the basement stairs.
TJ Crowley is a storybook hero. The redline beside the Crowley house is real history, drawn on a federal map in 1937 and still running down Hillside in 1968.
Follow along in the scriptbook
Adapted from Grant Overstake’s novel, winner of the Kansas Authors Club book award. The scriptbook prints the word-for-word performance script, exactly as the cast performs it. Bonus material, discussion questions, and educator guides included.
Get the scriptbookThe audio drama has won
- 2025 Audie Award, Young Adult
- IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year, Audiobook
- AudioFile Earphones Award
About this project
This series is published by Grain Valley Publishing Company, LLC, in support of The Real Education Project, the nonprofit arts and education effort that carries the drama into classrooms and public listening events.
A note on how this happened. At the 2025 Audie Awards, the Young Adult category came down to five finalists. Four were the audio divisions of some of the largest publishers in the world: Macmillan Audio, Simon & Schuster Audio, Penguin Random House Audio, and HarperAudio. The fifth was a publishing company in Wichita, Kansas, working with Blackstone Publishing. That one won.
Made possible by the fiscal sponsorship of the Youth Educational Empowerment Program and in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Fifteen actors voice twenty-four roles across 9:07:47 of audio. Directed and produced by May Wuthrich. Executive producer Grant Overstake. Recorded at John Marshall Media, New York City, and distributed by Blackstone Publishing.
The scriptbook these actors perform from is also free to perform yourself. The Redline Scenes releases scene cuttings from The Real Education of TJ Crowley for speech and forensics competition and classroom use, free to perform and cleared to compete, at no charge and with no separate contract.