She is also an acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, whose awards and honors include the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, the Katharine Washburne Memorial Lecture in Translation, the PEN/Book-of-the Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation, and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Translation from a Slavic Language. She is an Associate Editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (fourth edition, in progress) and is currently working on an authorized biography the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, entitled Czeslaw Milosz and His Age: A Critical Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). She has received the William Riley Parker Prize of the Modern Language Association, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, theSocial Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies for her work in Russian and Polish poetry.
Cavanagh's essays and translations have appeared in TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Partisan Review, Common Knowledge, Poetry, Literary Imagination and other periodicals.