Coach House Books today announced more changes to its poetry board. The good news? The press has resumed poetry acquisitions following a brief hiatus. The not-necessarily-bad-but-somewhat-regrettable news? Kevin Connolly, who served as Coach House’s sole poetry editor from 2007 to 2011, is stepping down to pursue his own writing.

Coach House’s poetry program will now be overseen by poets Jeramy Dodds and Susan Holbrook, both of whom published collections with the press under Connolly’s direction. The duo had been asked to form a poetry board with Connolly last December, when acquisitions were initially suspended.

In an email addressed to “friends of Coach House,” editorial director Alana Wilcox noted that Connolly “has brought a prestige and vivacity to the Coach House poetry program that will propel it far and successfully into the future.”

Wilcox added: “Kevin wants to return to his own writing “ and we think we owe it to Poetry to let him do so. We’d hate to get in the way of a Griffin- and Trillium-nominated poet writing more poems!”

Connolly is the author most recently of the collections Revolver and Drift (both House of Anansi Press). This fall, which sees the publication of books by Jonathan Ball, Mathew Henderson, Sarah Pinder, and Matthew Tierney, will be his final season as Coach House’s poetry editor, though Wilcox says he will continue to work on a handful of “ongoing projects.”

Coach House officially resumed poetry acquisitions Aug. 1, and Wilcox told Q&Q that submissions have been flooding in since then. The press offered the following bios for the members of its rejigged poetry board:

Jeramy Dodds grew up in Orono, Ontario. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award for poetry. His first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books, 2008), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, and won the Trillium Book Award for poetry. He currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where is the Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.

Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are the Trillium-nominated Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House, 2009), Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados, 2004) and misled (Red Deer, 1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. She lives in Leamington, Ontario, and teaches North American literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. She recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford University Press, 2010).