Phillis Wheatley 2026 Forever Stamps — Black Heritage Series, First-Class Postage

The 49th entry in the Black Heritage series honors Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784), the first author of African descent in the American colonies to publish a book. Enslaved, yet educated and moving among prominent social connections, she held a position almost no one else in colonial America occupied. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were taken with her poems, which carry a quiet commentary on her own era, and writers have been drawing on her example ever since.

The portrait

Kerry James Marshall drew the stamp art in ink on paper, in black and white, imagining Wheatley later in life at work on a second book of poems that was never published.

The composition deliberately recalls the only portrait made in her lifetime — the engraved frontispiece of her 1773 book. Marshall keeps the clothing and the desk, but turns her from profile to face the viewer directly. His hatching echoes the lines of the original engraving while the reading of the sitter changes entirely: confident, assertive, free.

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