The College Podcast Challenge, now in its third year, received nearly 500 entries from students in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Back in March, we announced our 10 finalists, and earlier this month, we shared the story of Michael Vargas Arango, grand prize winner of the 2023 competition.

Beyond these entries, though, we also received 22 podcasts that caught our ears and that our judges thought had a strong story to tell. Here are the honorable mentions.

650 Words by Audrey Auerbach Nelson

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.

A Hairy Situation by Jane Teran

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

All I Want for Christmas is an Environmentally Friendly Tree by Amanda Maeglin

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.

Brown Sheep by Isaac Wetzel

Belmont University, Belmont, Tenn.

Bypassers by Aisha Wallace-Palomares

University of California, Berkeley

Cheese Chicanery by Jake Silva

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Colorism in the Pilipinx Community by Malaya Mosqueda

San Jose State University, San Jose, Calif.

Experiencing Freedom Again by Ngan Siu Mei

University of Texas at Austin

How We Live: The Student Athlete Edition by Atavya Fowler

Miami Dade College

It’s Time To BeReal by Pari Goel

Duke University, Durham, N.C.

Juan’s Upon A Time by Juan Miguel Manalo

Miami Dade College

Love Beyond Belief by Jack Lindner

Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.

Palm Leaves by Suraj Singareddy

Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Puzzles: Are they still playing with our minds? by Yasha Mikolajczak

University of Missouri-Columbia

Rolling Against Hate with the Homos by Audreyanah McAfee

University of California, Berkeley

Sidelined by Jack Ottomano

Pennsylvania State University

SOS 204 Parking by Juanita Hurtado Huerfano

University of Colorado, Boulder

The History of the Silent Disco by Sam Kohn, Rachel Kupfer-Weinstein and Jacob Sarmiento

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo, Calif.

The Sleep Study by Morgan Barela

California State University, Long Beach

The Yellow Wallpaper: An Audio Adaptation by Diego Vazquez, Avery Meurer and Timo Nelson

University of Texas at Austin

Two Ranchers from Mining for the Climate by Juan Manuel Rubio, Nate Otjen, Alex Norbrook, Grace Wang, and Max Widmann. Featuring Rebecca Buck and Lisa Stroup

Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

UT’s Tower Bells: A Musical Tradition by Shaunak Sathe

University of Texas at Austin

Congratulations everyone! Thanks again for sharing your stories with us. We loved listening to every minute of them. We hope to hear from you again this fall.

NPR’s College Podcast Challenge will return Fall of 2024. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.

We met Brian Hawkins, a Redondo Beach mechanical engineer-turned-videographer, in the near-empty lobby of the Yosemite Valley Lodge. It was just after 9 on a Tuesday night in late April. Our hunt was about to begin, but the weather augured poorly.

“It’s cloudy, clearing later,” he said. “I would not expect to see anything yet.”

This was no chance meeting. A couple of years before I had discovered Hawkins’ website, where he posts photos, videos and very precise predictions of the phenomenon that had lured us to this place, at exactly this time: moonbows.

Naturalist John Muir called them lunar rainbows, or spraybows, revealed by a full moon’s light. Roaring spring and early summer waterfalls in Yosemite National Park make the central California destination one of the few spots on Earth to see them. The next viewing opportunity is May 21 to 25.

Moonbows haven’t realized the popularity of the park’s firefall each February, but visitors are gaining awareness. As we navigated the paved trail in darkness to Lower Yosemite Fall , we passed clumps of walkers going in the other direction, evidently discouraged by persistent clouds. At the base, some 25 were gathered in small groups, many behind a bend sheltering onlookers from the falls’ jet-loud spray.

Muir described the Yosemite Falls’ roar as “fine, savage music,” and Hawkins spoke movingly of how the falls, especially in the upper stretch, maintained a voice, even a presence. Having seen spectacular photos by him and others, my wife, Mica, and I impatiently waited for the moon to reflect the sun’s light on the falls. As did others.

One photographer showed me a quarter-moonbow image he had captured 20 minutes before during a cloud break. Another, Eric Krapil, 28, from Laurel, Md., shared a full-arc moonbow photo from the night before, captured on his cellular phone.

“We got lucky,” he said. “Some guy walking past us at the lodge said, ‘Do you want to see a moonbow?’”

We certainly did on this night. And a few minutes later, as the yellowish moon briefly shouldered through the haze, Hawkins pointed to a rock. There, he said, a corner of the moonbow begins.

And I saw it: A quarter arc at best, ghostly white in the moon’s faint light. Not everything I had hoped for, but as we walked back later I thanked Hawkins for helping us see that glimmer — a hint of what might come the following nights.

Yeah, he said. A thoughtful pause ensued.

“That was,” he continued, “the most pathetic moonbow I’ve ever seen.”

Before 2007, nobody was precisely sure when and where moonbows would appear at Yosemite. But a team of researchers from Texas State University harnessed computers to meld topography, geometry and astronomy to accurately predict the moonbows’ appearance and published their findings.

Hawkins first visited the park that same year and became mesmerized by its beauty — particularly after seeing a moonbow in 2011. He started doing his own modeling, and his website debuted in 2018. It’s a labor of love — there are no ads, and he doesn’t do tours or hawk T-shirts.

What he does do is help other seekers. Anna Smits, who lives and works in the Yosemite Valley, saw her first moonbow during the pandemic. The park was closed to visitors, but Hawkins still shared his calculations. Now, Smits — both an avid photographer and outdoorswoman — occasionally pushes the envelope to find more elusive moonbow shots.

What does that entail? One night, that involved setting an anchor and rappelling about 15 feet to a ledge near Upper Yosemite Fall. Another time, she set her alarm for 1:30 a.m. for a hike in bright moonlight to Vernal Fall. It was so cold that the condensed spray solidly froze her tripod.

“It’s such a rewarding experience,” she said. “It really lights me up just thinking about sitting in the spray and watching this moonbow cross in front of you.”

That visual reward eluded us on the subsequent two nights of our visit last month. Daytime blue skies surrendered to clouds at night. Hawkins had warned me that first night that nothing was guaranteed.

“Prepare to be enthralled by the scene before you but also frustrated by how difficult it is to shoot,” he said. “A lot of things are working against you — it’s cold, it’s wet, the lens has to be dried off, you can’t use auto focus. You just have to be patient and work through solving all the problems.”

And when the moon is hidden by a curtain of clouds, you comfort yourself with the memory of the falls’ voice and a glimmer of the show waiting when you return.

What is a moonbow?

Simply put, it’s a rainbow seen at night, produced by the light of a full moon reflecting off droplets of water suspended in the air. But humans struggle to detect color at night, so — as with the northern lights — they usually appear white to the naked eye. Photographs, especially with timed exposures to allow more light, render them in full color, just like a rainbow.

Is Yosemite the only place to see moonbows?

No, but there are very few waterfall sites where they can consistently be seen. They include Cumberland Falls in Kentucky and Africa’s Victoria Falls, at the Zambia-Zimbabwe border.

When are the best dates, times and locations to see Yosemite moonbows?

They are best observed on the five nights around the full moon. Hawkins has calculated peak 2024 viewing dates and specific hours by location (Upper and Lower Yosemite falls and Glacier Point) for the next viewing window of May 21 to 25 at his website. Best dates for the following full moon, with his time calculations to follow later, are June 19 to 23.

Is any special gear needed?

Useful items include comfortable walking shoes, a rain poncho if viewing near a fall’s base, cloths to dry lenses and cameras, a tripod for longer camera or smartphone exposures and a headlamp or flashlight (red-light settings are preferable for not disrupting night vision). Weather apps such as Clear Outside predict hourly cloud cover. For the super-advanced, apps such as Photo Ephemeris and Planit Pro will help precisely calculate moon positions (and much more).

Are Yosemite National Park reservations required?

Sometimes. Until June 30, daytime (5 a.m. to 4 p.m.) park entry reservations are required on weekends and holidays. From July 1 to Aug. 16, they are required daily for the same time periods. Those with in-park camping or lodging reservations will be granted park entry. Full rules and a reservation link can be found at the National Park Service’s website.

Is it risky looking for Yosemite moonbows at night?

We didn’t find it daunting. Lower Yosemite Fall is just a 10-minute walk from Yosemite Valley Lodge, where we stayed. Cook’s Meadow, with its broad view of Yosemite Falls, is also nearby, but we decided to drive, largely because dense cloud cover obscured the moonlight. Both Hawkins and Smits counseled using common sense in seeking more remote locations. It’s worth noting that the intrepid Muir, who never shrank from a challenge, almost died one night while chasing moonbows behind Yosemite Falls near Fern Ledge; he escaped drenched and numb from a “wild bath in moonlit spray.”

In an enchanted world, where does mystery begin? Two authors pose this question in new novels out this spring.

In Pages of Mourning by the Mexican magical realism interrogator-author Diego Gerard Morrison, the protagonist is a Mexican writer named Aureliano Más II who is at war with his memory of familial sorrow and — you guessed it — magical realism. And the protagonist Alma Cruz in Julia Alvarez’s latest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is also a writer. Alma seeks to bury her unpublished stories in a graveyard of her own making, in order to find peace in their repose — and meaning from the vulnerability that comes from unheard stories.

Both of these novels, one from an emerging writer and one from a long celebrated author, walk an open road of remembering love, grief, and fate. Both find a destiny not in death, but in the reality of abandonment and in dreams that come from a hope for reunion. At this intersection of memory and meaning, their storytelling diverges.

Pages of Mourning

Pages of Mourning, out this month, is set in 2017, three years after 43 students disappear from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College after being abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The main character, Aureliano, is attempting to write the Great Mexican Novel that reflects this crisis and his mother’s own unexplained disappearance when he was a boy. He’s also struggling with the idea of magical realism as literary genre — he holds resentment over being named after the protagonist in 100 Years of Solitude, which fits squarely within it. He sets out on a journey with his maternal aunt to find his father, ask questions about his mother, and deal with his drinking problem and various earthquakes.

Morrison’s voice reflects his work as a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City, who seeks to interrogate “the concept of dissonance” through blended art forms such as poetry and fiction, translation and criticism. His story could be seen as an archetype, criticism, or a reflection through linguistic cadence on Pan American literature. His novel name drops and alludes to American, Mexican and Latin American writers including Walt Whitman, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Márquez — and even himself. There’s an earnest use of adjectives to accompany the lived dissonance of his characters.

There’s nothing magical, in the genre sense, in Morrison’s story. There are no magical rivers, enchanted messages, babies born with tails. Morrison’s dissonance is real — people get disappeared, they suffer addictions, writer’s block, crazy parents, crazier shamans, blank pages, corruption, the loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real Pan-American life — because all of this we are also explicitly suffering up North — Morrison finds his magic. His Aureliano is our Aureliano. He’s someone we know. Probably someone we loved — someone trying so hard to live.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

From the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, The Cemetery of Untold Stories is Julia Alvarez’s seventh novel. It’s a story that’s both languorous and urgent in conjuring a world from magical happenings. The source of these happenings, in a graveyard in the Dominican Republic, is the confrontation between memories and lived agendas. Alvarez is an acclaimed storyteller and teacher, a writer of poetry, non-fiction and children’s books, honored in 2013 with the National Medal of Arts. She continues her luminous virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz.

Alma, the writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, has a goal – not to go crazy from the delayed promise of cartons of unpublished stories she has stored away. When she inherits land in her origin country — the Dominican Republic — she decides to retire there, and design a graveyard to bury her manuscript drafts, along with the characters whose fictional lives demand their own unrequited recompense. Her sisters think she’s nuts, and wasting their inheritance. Filomena, a local woman Alma hires to watch over the cemetery, finds solace in a steady paycheck and her unusual workplace.

Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and, once buried, begin to make them known: They speak to each other and Filomena, rewriting and revising Alma’s creativity in order to reclaim themselves.

In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone is on a quest to achieve a dream — retirement, literary fame, a steady job, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrites, when ambitions and memories bump into the reality of no money, getting arrested, no imagination, jealousy, and the grace of humble competence. Alma’s sisters, Filomena, the townspeople — all make a claim over Alma’s aspiration to find a final resting place for her memories. Alvarez sprinkles their journey with dialogue and phrases in Spanish and one — “no hay mal que por bien no venga” (there is goodness in every woe) — emerges as the oral talisman of her story. There is always something magical to discover in a story, and that is especially true in Alvarez’s landing place.

Marcela Davison Avilés is a writer and independent producer living in Northern California.