About This Stamp
With the 22nd stamp in the Literary Arts series, the U.S. Postal Service honors acclaimed writer Katherine Anne Porter.
Award-winning stamp artist Michael J. Deas based his painting of Porter on a 1936 photograph made by George Platt Lynes. By including a ship in the design, Deas links Porter's portrait to the sea voyage that inspired her best-selling novel Ship of Fools and to her assessment of life, which she called, "this brave voyage."
Art Director
Derry Noyes
For more than 40 years Derry Noyes has designed and provided art direction for close to 800 United States postage stamps and stamp products. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from Hampshire College and a master of fine arts degree from Yale University.
Noyes worked as a graphics designer at Beveridge and Associates, a Washington, D.C., firm, until 1979 when she established her own design firm, Derry Noyes Graphics. Her clients have included museums, corporations, foundations, and architectural and educational institutions. Her work has been honored by American Illustration, the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, Communication Arts, Critique magazine, Graphis, Creativity International, and the Society of Illustrators.
Before becoming an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, she served as a member of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee from 1981 to 1983.
Noyes is a resident of Washington, D.C.
Stamp Artist
Michael J. Deas
Michael J. Deas, an award-winning illustrator and master realist artist, was raised in suburban New Orleans and Long Island, New York. Although he took art classes as a young man, paying for them by working as an illustrator of novels and children’s books, he considers himself to be essentially self-taught.
For more than twenty-five years, Deas has created stamp images for the Postal Service™. His 1995 portrait of Marilyn Monroe was one of the top selling commemorative stamps ever. Since then, he has created twenty other portraits for stamps, among them Thomas Wolfe (2000), Audrey Hepburn (2003), Ronald Reagan (2005), Edgar Allan Poe (2009), George H.W. Bush (2019), and most recently Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2023).
The Society of Illustrators has recognized his works with five gold medals and two silver. Two of the gold medals were awarded for stamp designs: James Dean (Legends of Hollywood, 1996), and Thornton Wilder (Literary Arts, 1997). In 2004, Deas received the Hamilton King Award, given for the single best illustration of the year.
In 2012-13, forty of his original paintings, drawings, and illustrations were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. In the late nineties, Deas was one of seven artists whose works were featured in “Visual Solutions—Seven Illustrators and the Creative Process,” at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In addition to his artwork, Deas is a noted authority on Edgar Allan Poe. His 1989 book, The Portraits & Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe, documents more than seventy historic images of the poet and is now considered a standard reference work.
Over the years, clients have included TIME magazine (six covers), Columbia Pictures (redesign of the well known lady with a torch logo), Reader’s Digest, Random House, HarperCollins, Sports Illustrated, as well as a number of prominent advertising agencies.
Today, Deas works from his studio in the historic district of New Orleans.