With thousands of M&A transactions closing in 2012, which deals and dealmakers will win Mergers & Acquisitions’ coveted Mid-Market Awards? Over the coming weeks, our editorial staff will be seeking to identify the deals that transcended a sluggish economic recovery and the uncertainty of a hotly-contested presidential race that shone a bright light on private equity. We’ll be looking to honor the dealmakers who stood out from their peers in some demonstrable way, perhaps through impressive creativity or maybe just remarkable consistency.

We invite you to help us make the choice. Submit your nominations to editor-in-chief Mary Kathleen Flynn by sending email to [email protected] with Mid-Market Awards in the Subject line. To be considered, deals must have closed in 2012, and they had to be worth roughly $1 billion or less, to reflect our editorial focus on the middle market. Click here for more submission guidelines. ttp://www.themiddlemarket.com/about-the-awards/ The deadline is Jan. 11, 2013, and we’ll be announcing the winners in the on themiddlemarket.com in late February and featuring them in the March issue of the magazine.

In the meantime, take a look back at the award winners from 2011, including: Diamond S Shipping, whose CEO waited patiently for several years for just the right deal, and then managed to draw a syndicate of top-flight investors to back it; First Reserve, which raised an energy infrastructure fund, launched a Hong Kong office and participated in dozens of deals, including the Deal of the Year; Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN), which spent less than half a billion dollars up front to buy a vaccine that has the potential to change cancer treatment forever, while its competitors spent billions on similar bets; and eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), which shelled out a fraction of what Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) did on acquisitions but crafted a more coherent strategy. Click here for our full cover of last year’s winners.