The Library of Congress’s Poetry and Literature Center is accepting nominations for the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. The biennial prize is given for a poetry collection written by a U.S. citizen and published in the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The winner will receive $10,000 and will give a public reading in the fall.

Publishers may submit four copies of a book published in 2012 or 2013, along with the required entry form and a suggested $50 contribution to the Library of Congress by postal mail to Bobbitt Prize, Poetry and Literature Center, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20540. The postmark deadline is July 31. Books published in a standard edition of at least 1,000 copies are eligible. A collected or selected work is eligible only if it contains at least 30 poems previously unpublished in a book. A three-person jury and the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, will judge.

Established in 1990, the Bobbitt prize is given by the family of Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt (1910-1978). Bobbitt, who worked at the Library of Congress in the 1930s, was the late President Lyndon B. Johnson’s sister.

Gerald Stern won the 2012 Bobbitt Prize for Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 (Norton, 2010). Other winners of the prize include James Merrill, Louise Glück, A. R. Ammons, Kenneth Koch, Frank Bidart, W. S. Merwin, and Lucia Perillo.

Even if you're not a big fan of the Transformers movies, consider the basic idea of everyday machines transforming into some sort of robot or creature. This week, write a story in which one of your characters discovers a household appliance that has transformed itself into something else. For example, when making her morning toast, your character notices the toaster has morphed into a small flying machine, and is stuck in a tree in the backyard. Write about how your character feels upon discovering this machine has a mind of its own, and how her relationship with the machine in question, as well as the world around her, is altered after this experience.

"The city's old, / but new to me, and therefore / strange, and therefore fresh," Margaret Atwood muses in her poem "Europe on $5 a Day." Today write about being a visitor in a strange new city, walking the streets, and observing the locals going about their daily tasks. Describe in detail the smells in the air, the sounds clouding around you, and the unique images that meet your eyes. The goal is to make your reader feel like they are also seeing this place for the first time, even if they have been there before.