Friday, October 16, 2026
By turning her personal journey with dyslexia into an award-winning podcast, South Side Middle School seventh grader Cora Walsh has earned national recognition and a chance to inspire middle-schoolers across the country to share their own stories.
Walsh won National Public Radio’s Student Podcast Challenge for middle-school students with “Dyslexia and MEE,” an eight-minute podcast exploring her experiences with the learning difference and how understanding it has helped her better understand herself. The Rockville Centre resident’s entry was selected from nearly 1,500 submissions representing 42 states and Washington, D.C.
When Walsh learned she had won, her reaction was anything but reserved.
“I tackled my sister to the floor and enjoyed it,” she said of her 9-year-old sibling Maeve.
Her mother, Emily Johnson, was equally surprised by the news.
“I was floored,” Johnson said. “I mean, we loved the podcast, but, you know, she's never made one before.”
For Walsh, the project began with a suggestion from her mother, who listens to NPR and came across the annual competition. Johnson thought it would be an opportunity for her daughter to explore a subject she knew well and wanted to share with others.
“My mom loves NPR, and so she found it, like, and she's like, ‘Oh, this would be so cool, you should enter,’” Walsh said. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and then I wanted to do it about dyslexia, and then I did and I won.”
Walsh said she approached the competition with the goal of creating something enjoyable rather than focusing on winning.
“I was just more focused on having fun,” she said. “I was telling my story, but I never expected to win.”
Dyslexia affects how people process written language and can make reading and spelling challenging. Walsh wanted her podcast to explore those difficulties while also showing how people with dyslexia can recognize their strengths and learn how their brains work.
Johnson said the subject was a natural choice for her daughter, who has been comfortable discussing her experiences with dyslexia.
“I thought that made perfect sense because she's always been very open about sharing her experience with it and trying to understand how her brain works,” Johnson said. “She's always been willing to talk about it and share her experiences, and I thought, ‘What a good perspective.’”
Janet Lee, a producer of NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge and the public radio network’s society and culture desk, said Walsh’s entry distinguished itself through its personal approach and reporting.
“Cora's podcast stood out from the start,” Lee said. “I loved the way she used audio from her tutoring sessions to put listeners in her shoes. Our judges were moved by her vulnerability, opening up about her diagnosis and how it's impacted her life and learning.”
SUBHED: Crafting the podcast
Creating the podcast took months of work. Walsh began the project in January and spent about four months developing it, interviewing people and shaping their conversations into a finished piece. She recorded roughly three hours of interviews, which she ultimately had to condense into the competition’s eight-minute format.
Deciding what to keep proved especially challenging.
“Choosing what to put in the podcast from all my interviews might have been the hardest thing, because everything was so good and it was hard to figure out what to put in, because it can only be eight minutes long,” she said.
Among those featured in the podcast were Dan Hahn, a former co-worker of Johnson’s at AppNexus, an ad-tech company that was later bought by AT&T, and Walsh’s former tutor, Melissa Sansobrino, who offered their perspectives on dyslexia and the importance of recognizing that people learn in different ways.
“Being dyslexic is hard but it's also interesting. It's fun,” Hahn said in the podcast. “Not everyone has to be a great reader. Not everyone has to be a great speller.”
Sansobrino emphasized that learning differences do not define a person's abilities.
“We're all wired differently, right?” she asked during the podcast. “Everybody's got their strengths and weaknesses, and dyslexia is just one of those differences that we all have.”
Johnson said the project gave Walsh and Hahn an opportunity to discuss challenges as well as the positive aspects of how they think and learn.
“They both seemed to get really excited about really just having an environment where they could share the hard things that they've dealt with and the things that they liked about themselves and the way their brain works,” Johnson said.
The podcast was featured by NPR, including on “Morning Edition” on Oct. 9, bringing Walsh’s story to a national audience. For the seventh grader, hearing her own voice reach so many people was a remarkable part of the experience.
“It's really cool to hear myself and know that 11 million people are listening to me,” she said.
Johnson said the recognition was particularly meaningful because Walsh enjoys creative projects that do not always come with formal opportunities for acknowledgment.
“I think for her to be able to find a place where she could do something that she was passionate about and do it well and then get rewarded for it was really exciting to her,” she said.
Walsh enjoys reading fantasy books and graphic novels, including the “Wings of Fire” series. She hopes to enter the competition again next year, building on the experience of researching, interviewing and telling a story through audio.
For other students considering entering the contest or pursuing a creative project of their own, Walsh offered simple advice.
“To try your best,” she said. “And, you know, like, it'll get better.”
