Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker will bring her expertise on politics to the 2015 Mary Louise Smith Chair in Women and Politics lecture Thursday.

Parker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010, writes a column twice a week, appearing in the Washington Post and more than 500 newspapers — reaching an audience of about 80 million readers.

In an interview Tuesday before her visit to Iowa State this week, Parker talked about her career in writing, how she became interested in American politics and what to expect at her lecture this week.

“I’ve always written since I was a child,” Parker said. “This was partly because my mother died when I was young and my home was fairly chaotic, and I found my respite in keeping journals.”

She went on to graduate from Florida State University in Tallahassee, but first started at a private women’s college in South Carolina. After transferring, she spent a year in Spain through the University of San Francisco.

Parker learned Spanish while in Spain, and returned to Florida State for two years. She left with a master’s in Spanish literatures and dance.

“It’s like being an English major, you study English literature. It’s not like you sit around and do grammar all day,” Parker said. “I have always loved the Spanish culture, the Latino culture. I grew up in Florida, and some of my closest friends were Cuban. Through that exposure, I just fell in love with everything that related to Spanish culture.”

Fast forward to today, and Parker writes for the Post with a conservative bend on politics and culture.

“Journalism had interested me probably because I’m part of the ’60s generation when the world was in upheaval in 1968,” Parker said. “I was still in high school, my brother was in Vietnam. When I got to college, FSU was the Berkley of the South. There was a lot of anti-war, anti-establishment activity there. We had a student union that drank copious amounts of coffee and talked about politics.”

She said getting involved in political journalism was not unnatural, but she did not have a specific path in mind after college. She went back to South Carolina and ended up covering local government in Charleston, and after a few more gigs, was offered a job writing a column for the Orlando Sentinel in 1987.

Parker often appears on television, doing hits on MSNBC and appearing on NBC’s Sunday morning affairs program “Meet The Press.” She also co-hosted a CNN show with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2010 and 2011.

“It’s much harder to be on live television and therefore expected to fluent in half-a-dozen topics,” she said. “A column is one topic that you’ve had time to go over in your mind. So [TV] is challenging, it’s really hard at first. You have to get over your nervousness and have confidence in yourself.”

Parker said her lecture Thursday at Iowa State will focus on women in politics, including the two running for president this cycle.

“[It will] be about how the whole world is shifting — there is suddenly an appreciation that women do contribute something,” Parker said. “We’re way ahead of the curve obviously, but not really if you sit down and count how many women are serving in public office and the fact we haven’t elected a woman president.”

Parker wrote a book titled “Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care” in 2008, which argued feminism has veered off its original goal of equality, instead morphing into an anti-male movement.

“I will talk a bit about my trajectory from feminist to anti-feminist to born-again feminist, and how it corresponds to some trends,” Parker said. “But mainly my big transformative — I won’t tell you what it is because it’ll be a spoiler.”

Parker’s lecture will start at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night in Benton Auditorium of the Scheman Building at the Iowa State Center. The event is free and open to the public.

“I did have sort of a life-altering moment when I saw things completely differently, and even though I wrote a book called ‘Save the Males,’ I’m back on the girl’s team,” Parker said. “I traveled and I’ve seen what women are trying to achieve in countries that are far, far behind us, including the Middle East, and that was just an awakening for me. And I thought, ‘If this is the new feminist, count me in.’”