NPR has picked its best student podcast in the country for 2026, and it was made in Rockville Centre. Cora Walsh, a seventh grader at South Side Middle School, is the middle school grand prize winner of the eighth annual NPR Student Podcast Challenge, the network announced on October 9. Her entry, titled Dyslexia and MEE, was chosen from nearly 1,500 submissions sent in by students across 42 states and the District of Columbia.

A podcast about her own mind

Dyslexia and MEE is a first-person account of the years Cora spent trying to understand why reading felt harder for her than for her classmates. It took almost five years before she received an accurate dyslexia diagnosis, and the podcast walks through that stretch of her life: the frustration of struggling with words, the search for an explanation, and what changed once the diagnosis finally arrived.

She has now been working with a tutor for about two years, and the podcast lets listeners hear what that actually sounds like. One section includes audio from one of her real tutoring sessions over Zoom, as she sounds out words letter by letter. It is the kind of detail most people never hear unless they have been through it themselves, which is exactly the point. Cora has said she made the podcast so that dyslexia would feel less frightening to younger students who are still figuring out how they learn.

The turnaround

The work is paying off in her own reading life. This past summer, on a train trip, she read the first Hunger Games book for fun, a milestone her mother marks as a turning point, and she has since gone back for the second. Cora says she is a better reader now and enjoys it more than she used to.

She entered the challenge through South Side Middle School, and she has plans well beyond seventh grade: she wants to study neuroscience at Princeton and become a doctor. For now, she clears her head the way a lot of Rockville Centre kids do, on the walk home from school through the village's tree-lined blocks.

The competition

The NPR Student Podcast Challenge has run since 2019 and invites students from elementary school through high school to submit short podcasts on any subject. This year's finalists were announced on September 30, and the grand prize winners in the middle school and high school divisions were selected from that group by NPR's judges. Winning podcasts are featured on NPR's national programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which means a South Side seventh grader's podcast is now reaching a national audience.

Dyslexia and MEE is available to stream on SoundCloud, and NPR's write-up of Cora's win is on the network's Student Podcast Challenge page.

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