AMHERST - Award winning poet and professor Deborah Digges died Friday night of an apparent suicide at the McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts.
Digges, who was teaching at Tufts University in Medford, lived here for more than a decade. In 1996 she won the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Award, the largest prize given nationally for a single piece of work, for her collection "Rough Music."
UMass spokesman Edward F. Blaguszewski said that the women's lacrosse team from Temple University was practicing Friday at the stadium when they noticed a woman "in the upper reaches of the stadium."
He said they didn't pay much attention, but as they were leaving the stadium they found a woman lying on the ground just outside.
Digges, 59, was taken to Cooley Dickinson hospital in Northampton where she was pronounced dead.
Police found her car near the stadium, Blaguszewski said. Given what was found, he said police believe it was an apparent suicide.
In a 1996 interview after wining the poetry prize, Digges talked about how being a mother enriched her work.
"Kids keep you very close to experiences. You're kind of constantly thrown off track and that's good for a poet," she had said.
She had two children and a foster child then and a myriad pets. Digges had been studying to be a painter and didn't start writing poetry until she was 20, after she had her first son.
With painting, "you have to learn how to see. There has to be a cold eye as a painter. And you have to have a cold eye to write. Some part of you has to stand away ... what you see is not always beautiful."
She was the author of four poetry collections, including "Trapeze," and two memoirs, one called "The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence," the story of her son Stephen's difficult adolescence.
Her first book, "Vesper Sparrows," won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize from New York University. She received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
According to her biography at the Tufts University Web site; "Digges loves animals and has four dogs and a cat." She volunteered at the Dakin Animal Shelter in Leverett and "frequently travels to East Africa where she works with children at the Tumaini Orphanage at the foot of Mount Kenya."
Tufts English Department Chairman Lee Edelman in an e-mail wrote that Digges "was a poet of breathtaking talent and astonishing verbal dexterity. Her poems join a keen and unsentimental intelligence with a passionate love for the particularities of things in their beauty, their transience, and their complexity.
"The passion of her poetry expressed itself as well in the passion she brought to her teaching and mentoring of students.