An award-winning author will speak at 8 p.m. tonight in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union. Barry Lopez, a nonfiction writer, essayist, international traveler and activist, will be making his first appearance at Iowa State.

“We’re very excited about him coming,” says Pat Miller, director of the Lectures Program. “His nature of writing is attractive to the science side of the university as well as the humanities side.”

Lopez isn’t just an author, says Sheryl St. Germain, associate professor of English.

He’s worked with Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard, to design an undergraduate program in which science and humanities are combined, she says.

“He is someone who promotes interdisciplinary writings,” says St. Germain, who uses Lopez’s writing in her class teachings. “He tries to mix natural science and natural history in with narrative.”

One trait that makes Lopez stand out as an author is “his compassion for the non-human world,” St. Germain says. “He is relentless in wanting to honor that world — his real contribution to us is to understand and articulate a world that can’t speak for itself.

“He says that we have an inner-geography and an outer — the inner is our psyches, the outer is what is around us, such as where we are from and the landscape that surrounds us,” she says. “Our inner psyche is a landscape that has been affected and shaped by our outer geography.

“It’s interesting to think of our psyches as kind of a landscape of the psyche,” St. Germain says. “For example, what does it mean to grow up in a land where you’re exposed to the seasonal changes, or in my case, an area surrounded by swamps and floods and seasonal hurricanes? How does that affect me as a person? It’s that notion that we can understand the self better by thinking of where in the world we are and what we’re surrounded by.”

Although Lopez writes about the grandeur of nature, his writing style is very sparse, St. Germain says.

“He’s not someone who’s very firecrackery with his language,” she says. “There’s not a lot of metaphors and similies. He’s very much a journalist, and writes in a very spare, understated way. It’s so understated because he wants to highlight other voices and not the human voice.”

St. Germain says aspiring writers can take away some important lessons from Lopez.

“He says that you should read everything,” she says. “You should get out of town and then you should discover what your own beliefs are and speak to us from those beliefs.”

Who: Barry Lopez

What: “The Writer as Environmentalist and Activist”

Where: Sun Room, Memorial Union

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Cost: Free