The Committee on Honors and Awards of the Modern Language Association invites submissions for the eighth MLA Prize for a Distinguished Bibliography. The award was established in 1998 and is presented each even-numbered year. For the current award, the committee solicits submissions of enumerative and descriptive bibliographies published in serial, monographic, book, or electronic format in 2010 or 2011. A multivolume bibliography is eligible if at least one volume was published during that period. The prize will be given without regard to the language of the compiler or of the text presented in the bibliography, as long as it falls within the subject scope of the MLA (e.g., modern languages and literatures, composition theory, folklore, linguistics). Editors or compilers need not be members of the MLA.

Criteria for determining excellence include evidence of analytical rigor, meticulous scholarship, intellectual creativity, and subject range and depth. To qualify for the award a bibliography should employ editorial principles appropriate to its materials, and those principles should be clearly articulated in the compilation; the bibliography should provide appropriate contextual information; the bibliography should exhibit the highest standards of accuracy in the presentation of its entries; and the text should be presented as accessibly and elegantly as possible. The prize, which consists of a cash award, a certificate, and a one-year membership in the association, will be presented to the winning bibliographer(s) at the association's annual convention in January 2013.