Professor of English Deborah Digges died Friday night in an apparent suicide at the University of Massachusetts, Amhert. Digges, a celebrated poet and award-winning author, was 59.
Digges' body was found on the ground at McGuirk Alumni Stadium at UMass-Amherst. The UMass Amherst Police Department said her death was an apparent suicide and found "no evidence of foul play," according to Ed Blaguszewski, a university spokesman.
"Deborah's passing is a great loss for American poetry, but it is an especially painful loss for the Tufts community where we knew her not only as one of the outstanding creative visionaries in American poetry, but also as an inspiring teacher, a generous mentor, and a cherished friend," University President Lawrence Bacow, Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha, Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, Arts and Sciences Dean of Academic Affairs Vickie Sullivan and Department of English Chair Lee Edelman said on Monday in an e-mail to the Tufts community.
On Friday, members of the Temple University women's lacrosse team were practicing in preparation for a game the next day on fields near the Amherst football stadium, Blaguszewski told the Daily. During their practice, they saw a woman walking in the stands near the top of the stadium. They discovered Digges' body lying outside, as they were leaving and contacted police.
Digges, an Amherst resident, was later pronounced dead at Cooley Dickenson Hospital in Northampton, Mass. The police found her car parked near the stadium, according to Blaguszewski.
Digges was the author of two memoirs and four collections of poetry. One of her volumes, "Rough Music" (1995), in 1996 won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award.
Her first book, "Vesper Sparrows" (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize for best first book from New York University.
"Her poetry looked closely at the natural world, at family life, at the painful inevitability of loss and the constant surprise of joy," the message read.
Her memoirs, "Fugitive Spring" (1991) and "The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence" (2001), focus on her family life. The first tells of her experience growing up, and the second is about her role as a parent.
Digges loved animals and volunteered at an Amherst animal shelter and volunteers often at an orphanage in East Africa, according to her biography on the university's Web site.
Before her death, she had been working on a forthcoming poetry collection and a historical work about Sarah Winchester, according to the e-mail to the Tufts community. "We are deeply saddened that her voice has been silenced too soon," the e-mail said.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, an English lecturer who knew Digges well, called the late professor a "very idiosyncratic ... interesting and complicated character."
"She had her own way of doing things... She was very unconventional," Gibson said, adding that Digges kept the windows open in her house in order to allow animals in and out. "She was a very private person... She had a very incisive intelligence."
Gibson said she spoke with Digges a decent amount during the past week and that the Digges did not do anything out of the ordinary during that time.
This semester, Digges taught Forms of Poetry, a creative writing course, and Architecture of the Imagination, a literature class.
A tribute to Digges will take place today at 5:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Room in Ballou Hall. Community members will read from Digges' poetry or other works and will share memories of the late professor.
Digges received a Bachelor's of Arts from the University of California, Riverside in 1975 and a Master's of Arts from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1982; both degrees were for English. She received a Master's of Fine Arts in 1984 from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
The late professor had two sons and two stepsons. She was married to Franklin Loew, the dean of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine from 1982 to 1995, who died in 2003.
Senior Marlo Kronberg, an English major and one of Digges' students, her a "special and unique person." He recalled how Digges read one of her classes the poem "For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles," by Larry Levis, and began crying.
"She was such a wonderful, caring human being ... She had a special gift," Kronberg said. "We've lost a great author, woman and teacher."
