A regular reviewer of poetry collections, Kevin Cantwell edited Quarterly West magazine in graduate school. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Metre, The SHOp, Poetry Wales, Commonweal, Antioch Review, and The Paris Review. One of his poems was reprinted in The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Dinner, Death, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 (Picador, 2003).

At Macon State College he edits Redbone Chapbooks, which publishes an occasional collection by a Georgia poet who has not yet published a first book. In 2002, his book Something Black in the Green Part of Your Eye was published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan State University. He has won the Academy of American Poets Prize; has won the River City Poetry Award; has won a Tennessee Williams Scholarship; and has won the Agnes Scott Poetry Prize.