Last month, Harker fifth grader Ameya Desai received a school-day visit from NPR to notify her that she had won the a Grand Prize in National Public Radio’s Student Podcast Challenge for grades 5-8. It was her second time winning the contest, prompting NPR to call her the contest’s first-ever “returning champion.” NPR producer Janet Lee surprised Desai during her morning music class to present her with a certificate and interviewed her briefly about the subject of the podcast that won the contest. It was chosen from among 2,000 entries from 48 states.

For the winning episode, titled “Far From Home – Shikata Ga Nai,” Desai interviewed Linda Horikawa, a Japanese-American who was incarcerated at the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming during World War II. The interview chronicles Horikawa’s childhood, which began on a berry ranch in Cupertino and was thrust into chaos when she was just 2 years old, when Japanese-Americans were rounded up and forced to live in 10 camps located across the country.  Horikawa spoke of her life in the camps as well as the prejudice she and her family experienced.

Desai, who enrolled at Harker this year, won the Student Podcast Challenge as a fourth grader for the previous entry in the “Far From Home” series, titled “Sugarcanes On My Mind,” which told the story of her grandfather’s forced migration from India, first to Uganda then to the United States.

NPR has posted the full story on Desai and her podcast.