Saturday, October 23, 2021

Diggs, Deborah Sugarbaker - Amherst, MA

 


Deborah Sugarbaker Diggs
Wildwood Cemetery
Amherst, MA
N 41° 53.501 W 072° 30.675


The grave of Deborah Sugarbaker Digges and her third husband Franklin Martin Loew is marked by a beautiful bronze sculpture of a running horse set on a bronze plinth over a rectangular polished black granite base. The front of the base is inscribed:

FRANKLIN MARTIN LOEW SEPT. 5, 1939 - APRIL 22, 2003

DEBORAH SUGARBAKER DIGGES FEB. 6, 1950 - APRIL 10, 2009

The top of the base is inscribed: WE'LL MEET AGAIN.

Deborah Leah Sugarbaker was born Deborah in Jefferson City, MO on February 6, 1950. She studied art at the University of Missouri and earned a BA degree in English at the University of California, Riverside, in 1975, and a Master of Fine Art degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She took the last name of her first husband, an Air Force pilot, with whom she had two children. She was predeceased by her third husband Franklin Martin Loew, who was a Dean at Tufts University where she was a professor.

Deborah Sugarbaker Digges wrote lyrically and hauntingly about the challenges of everyday life. Collections of her poetry include: Digges’s collections of poetry include Vesper Sparrows (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize for a best first book of poetry; Late in the Millenium (1989); Rough Music (1995), Trapeze (2004), The Wind Blows through the Doors of my Heart (2010). She also wrote two books of memoirs: Fugitive Spring (1992), and "The Stardust Lounge: Stories From a Boy's Adolescence (2001).

She won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize for a best first book of poetry for Vesper Sparrows, and the Kingsley Tufts Award for Rough Music. She died on April 10, 2009 of an apparent suicide in a fall from the top of the McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Setting


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