If you’re free on Monday night, consider joining Dundalk-born “Roots of Steel” author Deborah Rudacille and three other venerable figures in the Baltimore arts and letters landscape.

It’s happening on Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. at Freddies Ale House (7209 Harford Road) where fiction writer, Wire screenwriter, former reporter, arts impresario, deviled-egg devotee and sometime Brew contributor Rafael Alvarez is launching a new reading series.

The group he has assembled are jumbo Baltimore talents, each skilled in their own way at plucking premium lump from life’s crustiest places and steamiest moments

Alvarez says this is the 2013 version of his Greektown 2012 Reading Series. And that there will be a free buffet.

(Fern Shen and Mark Reutter of Baltimore Brew will be on hand too, to hand out Brew coffee mugs to Kickstarter contributors we still haven’t “mugged” and to say hello to readers and thanks for your continued support.)

The Line-up

• Rudacille’s most recent book tells the story of the rise and fall of a town and its economic engine – the now shuttered Sparrows Point steel mill – through the eyes of a steelworker’s daughter. On Monday, though, she’ll be reading fiction, a new short story that features Edgar Allan Poe and the Civil War.

• Photographer Jennifer Bishop will show and discuss some of the haunting images she has made over 35 years as a photojournalist and fine art and commercial photographer tromping Baltimore’s back alleys and finished basements. Bishop began shooting photos for Baltimore City Paper in 1977 (back when it was called City Squeeze) and continued shooting her iconic page 3 photos for them through 1994.

• Michael Olesker, longtime Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ commentator and chronicler of city lore and legend, will read from his latest book, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” Drawing on personal interviews and journalistic digging, he tells stories from the formative years of people like Nancy Pelosi, Thurgood Marshall and Barry Levinson.

• Poet Dan Cuddy, editor of the Loch Raven Review, will read from his work as well. To get an idea of how deep and detailed Cuddy’s roots in the B-more poetry scene are, we recommend this piece co-authored with fellow local poet David Eberhardt. His work appears in the Review, Manorborn other publications. A book of his poems was published in 2003, Handprints on the Windows.