Today, Jan. 28, the U.S. Postal Service marks the achievements of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson (“Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”) with a Forever Stamp, the 44th in its “Black Heritage” series.
(A film of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” another of his plays in the “American Century Cycle” – chronicling African-American lives over the course of the last century, mainly in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where he grew up – was released in December on Netflix.)
The new stamp, featuring an oil painting of Wilson based on a 2005 photograph, was designed by art director Ethel Kessler with art by Tim O’Brien and includes a picket fence alluding to Wilson’s play “Fences.”
A pictorial postmark of the First Day of Issue location in Pittsburgh is available at usps.com/stamps. For more, visit usps.com/blackheritage-augustwilson.
