About This Stamp
The 49th stamp in the Black Heritage series honors poet Phillis Wheatley (ca 1753–1784), the first author of African descent in the American colonies to publish a book. An enslaved woman with an education and prominent social connections, Wheatley occupied a rare place in colonial America. Her poems charmed readers on both sides of the Atlantic and offer subtle commentary on her times, while Wheatley herself has inspired generations of writers.
Born in West Africa and brought to Boston on a slave ship, the child who would become known as Phillis Wheatley was enslaved by merchant John Wheatley and educated in his household. By age 11, she had already begun to compose her own poems. Her 1773 collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, showcased her mastery of forms ranging from hymns and elegies to philosophical and narrative verse.
The stamp art features a black-and-white ink-on-paper portrait of Wheatley by Kerry James Marshall, who imagines her later in life, working on her second, unpublished book of poems. The design recalls the only known portrait made during her lifetime, the engraved frontispiece of her 1773 book. While that image shows Wheatley in profile, Marshall presents her looking directly at the viewer, even as she wears similar clothing and sits at the same desk. The style of his ink-on-paper portrait echoes the hatched lines of the original engraving but reinterprets the portrait, depicting Wheatley as confident, assertive, and free.
As a figure whose life and writing speak to the complexity of her times, Wheatley is especially relevant in 2026 as we reflect on the Revolutionary era as part of our nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. Wheatley was freed from slavery in 1773, and her later poems reflected growing support for the American Revolution. In late 1775, while George Washington was encamped near British-occupied Boston, Wheatley sent him an ode, published the following year, in which she suggests that the nations of the world are closely watching him to see if a new age in human history is dawning. Washington replied with praise for Wheatley’s poetic talents and extended an invitation to meet if she found herself near his headquarters.
Although Wheatley kept writing, she was unable to publish a second book before her death in her early thirties. Her poetry continued to circulate widely, and her book was reprinted several times in the United States. Before the Civil War, abolitionists republished her work as an argument against slavery. Abolitionists and emancipationists invoked her name and accomplishments to affirm a shared humanity and the intellectual ability of people of African descent. Her legacy endures today: Schools, libraries, community centers, and university buildings across the country bear her name, and she has inspired numerous children’s books. In 2003, a statue of Wheatley was included in the new Boston Women’s Memorial, all part of an ongoing effort to recognize the poet often praised as “the mother of African American literature.”
The Phillis Wheatley stamp is being issued as a Forever® stamp. This Forever stamp will always be equal to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Antonio Alcalá
Antonio Alcalá served on the Postmaster General’s Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee from 2010 until 2011, when he left to become an art director for the U.S. Postal Service's stamp development program.
He is founder and co-owner of Studio A, a design practice working with museums and arts institutions. His clients include: the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian Institution. He also lectures at colleges including the Corcoran College of Art + Design, SVA, Pratt, and MICA.
In 2008, his work and contributions to the field of graphic design were recognized with his selection as an AIGA Fellow. He has judged international competitions for the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, AIGA, and Graphis. Alcalá also serves on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Poster House Museum’s advisory councils. His designs are represented in the AIGA Design Archives, the National Postal Museum, and the Library of Congress Permanent Collection of Graphic Design.
Alcalá graduated from Yale University with a BA in history and from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in graphic design. He lives with his wife in Alexandria, Virginia.
Existing Art by
Kerry James Marshall
Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Kerry James Marshall is known for his expansive body of work, which also includes drawings and sculptures. At the center of his oeuvre is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility long ascribed to Black figures in the Western pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a “counter-archive” that brings them back into this narrative.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Marshall received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States since the late 1970s.
In 2015, Marshall created a large-scale mural specifically for the High Line, marking the artist’s first public commission in New York. His site-specific outdoor sculpture A Monumental Journey was also permanently installed in Hansen Triangle Park in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, in 2018. In 2023, he unveiled his stained-glass window commission for the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
From 2016 to 2017, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, the first major museum survey of Marshall’s work, was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, followed by The Met Breuer, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2018, Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works was presented at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver and Kerry James Marshall: Works on Paper at The Cleveland Museum of Art. The largest survey of the his work in the United Kingdom to date, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, was on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from September 2025 to mid-January 2026. The exhibition will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2026–2027.
Marshall was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2013. His awards and honors include a 1991 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a 1997 grant from the MacArthur Foundation; the 2014 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, given annually by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; the 2016 Rosenberger Medal, given by the University of Chicago for outstanding achievement in the creative and performing arts; the 2019 W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University; and election as an Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy, London, in 2023.
Marshall’s work can be found in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Marshall lives and works in Chicago.
