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This episode of Season 10 aired on Sunday 16th November 2025. It is produced and hosted by Damien B. Donnelly. Below are details and links to the guest stars…

Merril D. Smith

Merril D. Smith is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet who writes from southern New Jersey. Her work has been published widely in poetry journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis, Sidhe Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Storms, The Broken Spine, Gleam, and Frazzled Lit. Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts (Nightingale & Sparrow Press) was Black Bough Poetry’s December 2022 Book of the Month. Her collection, Held Inside the Folds of Time (Jane’s Studio Press) was published in 2025. 

Follow Merril on Instagram or via her website and you can buy Held in the Folds of Time here.

Trisha Norton

Trisha Norton is an Irish writer of prose and poetry. She holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and studied Strategic Storytelling at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York. She is a two-time recipient of the Arts Council’s Your Voice Matters award, alongside her novel also being selected for the Irish Writers Centre’s National Mentoring Programme. She has performed her words at both the West Cork Literary Festival and the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Her work reckons with the myths we are handed about romance, worthiness, womanhood — and is an active reclamation of voice, space, and sovereignty. Through her words, she charts the messy, beautiful terrain of becoming, offering language to the parts of us that often go unnamed. Rooted in emotional honesty and spiritual sensitivity, she invites readers to come home to themselves through her works.

Follow Trisha on her website and on Instagram.

Deepika Singh

Deepika Singh is an Indian native from Margherita, Assam. By profession, a teacher. She is a budding poetess. Her writings are a reflection of the everyday experiences she has. She thinks the correct words have the power to transform our culture. Her works were featured in various national and international publications.

Follow Deepika on Instagram.

Hua Ai

Hua Ai (also sometimes published as Nikolina Hua, Nikolina Ai) is a London-based writer with an MA in Media & Communications and a BA in English Literature. Published in Mandarin since fifteen, her English-language poetry has received international recognition and appears across the UK, US, Australia, India, and Uzbekistan. Her chapbook, Exiles Across Time, moves between myth and lived witness—Lilithic refusals, Sarajevo’s rivers, East China Sea beacons—braiding Mandarin’s suggestive poetics with English’s direct address. Her work explores spiritual animality, intersectional feminism, mythic sensuality, and sisterhood. She is currently completing a debut literary-fiction novel set amid political unrest and emotional reconstruction. When not writing, she is either running or finding calm by the lake, alongside parenting five rescue cats.

Follow Hua on Bluesky at @nkahwat.bsky.social

Host / Producer Damien B Donnelly

Damien B Donnelly is a 50-year-old Irish, adopted, queer writer & podcast producer who spent 23 years in Paris, Amsterdam, and London working in the fashion industry, returning to Dublin at the end of 2019. He’s the host / producer of Eat the Storms and the EIC of The Storms, the printed journal of poetry, prose & visual art. His debut pamphlet, Eat the Storms, published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured on the Poetry Book Society Winter List 2020/21, followed by a Pushcart Prize nominated Stickleback (micro collection) and In the Jitterfritz of Neon, a conversational pamphlet co-written with Eilín de Paor. His first full collection Enough! was also published by Hedgehog in August 2022. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, online and in print. His 2^nd full collection, Back from Away, was published in May 2024 with Turas Press. He is the Head of Programming at the Irish Writers Centre.

The Storms journal is available here

Follow Damien is on X and instagram and Bluesky: @eatthestorms,com

You can purchase his pamphlets and collections at his website

Backing music for Eat the Storms is from Purple Planet Royalty Free Music

You can find us on many platforms including Spotify and here is the link…