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Deborah Digges was born Deborah Leah Sugarbaker in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1950. The sixth of ten children, Digges grew up accompanying her oncologist father on his rounds, as well as visiting a women’s prison where her mother taught religion.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Riverside in 1976, a Masters from the University of Missouri in 1982, and her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1984. In the course of her academic career, Digges taught in the writing and English faculties of New York University, Boston University, Columbia University, and Tufts University.
Her poetry often recounts episodes from her childhood, as well as her experiences as a young wife and mother. In addition to poetry, Digges published two well-received memoirs. In Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the ‘50s and ‘60s (1992), she chronicles her childhood growing up in Missouri, describing her frustration with the gender roles of the day and detailing how she found freedom in the 1960s when she was able to develop her own identity. According to the Chicago Tribune, Digges “produces tones, shades and images that are precise, crisp, and evocative.” Digges’s second memoir, The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy’s Adolescence (2001) is a portrait of her younger son, Stephen, called “a hell-raiser of mythic proportions” by Emily Fox Gordon in the New York Times. Stephen, a frustrated, gifted, and alienated teen, shook Digges’s complacency and filled her with questions. That questioning spirit pervades Digges’s work in both poetry and memoir. In the New Yorker, John Michaud noted his feeling after reading a poem by Digges: “I was discovering something new, but that the discovery was somehow illicit, that I was looking into someone else’s private thoughts.” A long-time professor at Tufts University, Digges died in 2009 in Amherst, Massachusetts at age 59.
She received many honors and awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
In 1997 Digges was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the largest prize for a single work of poetry, for her book Rough Music. She was also the winner of two Pushcart Prizes. Digges translated the poems of the Cuban poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela. A book of poetry, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems was published by Knopf in 2010.
Her poems often rely on the relationship between humans and nature, the primitive urges of discovery and rediscovery, and the physical consequences of such momentary losses of the self.
Quotes from others about the person
As Willard Spiegelman wrote for The Yale Review: “Thinking through images, Digges wends her insistent, surprising way down a path alternately straight and curving, placid and perilous.”
Deborah Digges was married to Charles Diggs, who was an Air Force pilot in 1969, they divorced in 1980. The second time she married Stanley Plumley in 1985, they divorced in 1993. She had two sons.
