Two award-winning American authors will be honored next year with postage stamps, the United States Postal Service announced this week.
The late U.S. Rep. John Lewis will be the subject of a new stamp. “Devoted to equality and justice for all Americans, Lewis spent more than 30 years in Congress steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s,” the USPS said.
Lewis was the author of several books, including an autobiography, Walking With the Wind, co-written with Michael D’Orso, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. More recently, he wrote the March trilogy of graphic memoirs with Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell; the third installment won the National Book Award for young people’s literature.
Also honored with a stamp will be children’s book author and illustrator Tomie dePaola, who the Postal Service praised for his “extraordinarily varied body of work [that] encompasses folktales and legends, informational books, religious and holiday stories, and touching autobiographical tales.”
DePaola is best known for his books including Strega Nona, Jingle the Christmas Clown, and Days of the Blackbird. In 2011, he won the prestigious Children’s Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association.
In October, the USPS announced that two other American writers would get their own stamps next year: Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Song of Solomon and Beloved, and Ernest J. Gaines, whose novels include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
