Carmel High School senior Violet Maxinoski beat more than 700 entries to win a national prize from NPR for an eight-minute podcast about her mother's deployment to Iraq.

Maxinoski's entry, "The Journal," earned one of seven America 250 special prizes in NPR's 2026 Student Podcast Challenge, the school's student newspaper, The Sandpiper, reported Sept. 3. The win is Carmel High's first national title in the competition, which the school has entered since 2021.

The podcast draws on handwritten journal entries kept by her mother, Sgt. Sandi Maxinoski, during a 2003–04 deployment in Mosul, Iraq. Violet wrote the script, interviewed her mother at home and layered in guitar music Sandi played herself.

"I really wanted it to be personal," Violet told The Sandpiper. "And I realized I wanted to delve deeper into my mom's time in the Army."

The recording opens with imagery from Sandi's journal describing a young girl in Mosul who "learns the sound of motors before she learns the Arabic alphabet." Through a conversation between mother and daughter, the podcast explores what everyday freedoms mean to someone who served in a war zone and then came home.

NPR's listing for the winners describes Sandi recounting "cities fractured by bombings, checkpoints, smoke and uncertainty," then returning to the United States where she felt an "intense amount of security" walking down the street.

Sandi originally kept the journal to process her experiences overseas. After returning home, she transcribed the entries and submitted them to the National Endowment for the Arts. One of her original songs, "In the Hanger," was published in "Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families," according to The Sandpiper.

Shelley Grahl, Violet's AP English Language and Composition teacher at Carmel High, served as her contest sponsor. Violet was Grahl's only student to enter this year.

Sandi said revisiting her service with her daughter helped her process the experience further.

The annual contest, now in its eighth year, invites students from fourth grade through high school to produce original nonfiction audio stories between three and eight minutes. Entries are judged on reporting, writing and production quality. The America 250 prize winners were announced July 3 to coincide with the nation's 250th birthday and were featured on NPR's Morning Edition.

Carmel High had previously earned one honorable mention in the contest. As of Sept. 3, the competition's separate general grand prize winner had not yet been announced.