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Hi there!

I'm a writing professor & journalist based in Astoria, NY, who was raised in LA and grew up in Alaska 🐻‍❄️

About Me

FYI: published under "Matt Caprioli" until 2022

After a couple of years making every mistake you can think of as a student journalist with The Northern Light (go Seawolves!), I joined The Anchorage Press, Alaska's largest alt weekly, from 2012 to 2015 as an arts and culture reporter. 

I have freelanced for dozens of publications focused on music (Quip), performance art and theater (Chance), and literature (Lambda Literary), as well as general interest outlets, including The Anchorage Daily News, HuffPost, Bushwick Daily, and The Paris Review Daily. 

I started writing for The Red Hook Star-Revue as an arts & culture reporter in 2017, became the arts editor a year later, and exited in 2019 after doubling the coverage and staff of the arts section and establishing an internship program with CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

As of 2020, I pay the bills as a Lecturer of Professional Writing with CCE (tenure) at Lehman College, City University of New York. I advised the student-run newspaper, The Meridian, from 2021 to 2024, and I am currently a pro bono editorial consultant for The Anchorage Press, which is re-launching with a new publisher after several tumultuous years.

My ultimate aim is to make the world a smarter, kinder, more beautiful place, and community-based journalism is where that process begins.

Feel free to contact me if you're looking for ways to get your story out there. I especially welcome cold pitches from artists, entrepreneurs, and non-profits. 

Knicks in Five,

— Matthew Frye-Castillo

"The Right to Slay" - The Gay & Lesbian Review

Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights takes its title from Romeo and Juliet. Set in Pittsburgh in the early 1970s, the novel features an equally doomed relationship between two teenage Jewish college students, Paul (serious-minded, middle-class, artistic) and Julian (charismatic, wealthy, seemingly duplicitous). The two bond in a philosophy class over what they see as moral cowardice from most of the world’s inhabitants: Every day they observe the common cruelties that have enabled such horro...
Lambda Literary Review •

Edgar Gomez's Intricate and Emotive Memoir, High-Risk Homosexual

Publishers tend to market gay memoirs as campy, joyful, and frivolous or serious, profound, and brooding. High-Risk Homosexual, the debut memoir by the talented Edgar Gomez, manages to fall into both categories—a funny beach-read with piercing cuts into lived reality, all conveyed in a wry yet generous tone. 


The voice and structure of High-Risk Homosexual make each chapter a propulsive delight. Gomez could write beautifully about a toothpick, but the 29-year-old has gathered a roster of pecu...
Lambda Literary Review •

This Town Sleeps is an Emotional Wrought Tale of Community and Redemption

The writer Dennis E. Staples’ debut novel This Town Sleeps (Counterpoint Press) takes place on a 667-person Minnesota reservation town named Geshig. In a sparse and beautiful page-long prologue, we encounter a violent act against Kayden Kelliher, a 17-year-old Geshig High School basketball star. His death, brought on by gang violence and communal depression, haunts the town in this story of violence, redemption, and self-determination.
Years later, the sudden murder of another teen affects every...
Bushwick Daily •

Anything Goes at Mama D’s | Bushwick Daily

A new speakeasy bonanza on the border of Ridgewood and Bushwick, features everything from your wildest trip: unspeakably good pastries, intelligent chit-chats over film, a bathroom lacquered in Golden Girls memorabilia, another plastered with cinematic porn cut-outs (visitors are welcome to add photographs of their own flesh to the wall). 

This new project is the brainchild of a photographer, Diana, whose energy, vision, and nurturing camaraderie earned her the nickname Mama D among her f...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

The Persistence of Morgan O’Hara - Red Hook Star-Revue

It’s hard to know where to start with the artist Morgan O’Hara. Since the late 70s, she’s drawn over 4,000 pieces from everyday life — dinner with some lively Italians, a Noam Chomsky lecture, a Taiwanese Lion Dance performance — works she calls “Live Transmission.” On first approach, you’ll see a condense fog of scribbles or a soft web of lines so threadbare to looks like lace. But picking a line (any line!) and following its curve and density, its meetings with the velocity of its neighbors, t...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

Queen America on Facebook Watch - Red Hook Star-Revue

In retrospect, it was inevitable: Facebook now streams original content that is actually good.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans have a Facebook account, and the whole platform is made to like, watch, and share “content.” With the fog light of hindsight, it’s amazing that Facebook didn’t capitalize on their captive audience sooner.
Amazon and Netflix both set sail with scripted TV in 2013. Facebook Watch launched 2017 but has focused on sports and 10-30 minute talk or reality shows, i.e. stuff Face...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

Photographer James Venuti at BWAC - Red Hook Star-Revue

Innovative photography at BWAC
 Queens-raised artist James Venuti is a pharmacy manager by day and a photographer by all other hours. His sprawling image of the Flatiron Building “Turn to the Right” is on display at Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC), the 25,000 square foot warehouse that continues to be a remarkable incubator of emerging and well-established artists.
“Turn to the Right” is part of his compelling series Living Frames, photos of iconic NYC landmarks where each photograp...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

A View from the Bridge at The Waterfront Museum - Red Hook Star-Revue

If “Death of a Salesman” deals with economic whiplash and “The Crucible” warns of religious frenzy, Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” reckons with the tidal force of sexuality. Brave New World Repertory Theater in Flatbush does memorable justice to the classic, now running through June 24 and directed by Alex Dmitriev.
It’s mid-1950s Red Hook, and according to lifelong resident and lawyer Alfieri (Joe Gioco) the Sicilian population has calmed down over the years. Alfreri, by turns narrat...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

The Hidden Histories of the Mary A. Whalen - Red Hook Star-Revue

When the Queen Mary 2 was docked at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, on May 17, Red Hook took notice.  
Mark’s Pizzeria put out a sign welcoming the ocean liner that temporarily reconverted the skyline.  
“I have noticed the QM2 a few times,” Christina Daniels at Pioneer Works wrote in an email. “It always takes me a minute to realize it’s there because it’s so massive and looks like a high-rise that popped up overnight rather than a cruise ship.”  
Through a galley window of the Mary A. Whalen, a...
Red Hook Star-Revue •

New York’s Most Popular Writing Method You’ve Never Heard Of  - Red Hook Star-Revue

Even if you have zero interest in writing, you’ve probably seen a cab-yellow newsstand of catalogs for Gotham Writers Workshop, or the lime green advertisements for Sackett Street Writers Workshop. Since 2002, Sackett Street has worked with over 3,500 writers, and Gotham Writers (founded in 1993) currently averages 2,800 New Yorkers a year with their in-person classes. But trumping both of these two well-known programs is the less publicly glitzy group, New York Writers Coalition (NYWC). Founded...
Anchorage Daily News •

BodyVox breathes theatricality into modern dance

In 2005, the future executive director of the Anchorage Concert Association, Jason Hodges, was watching a video of a man dancing with a backhoe. Hodges was just entering the world of event programming in Alaska, and he was surprised not only by the odd presentation of man and machine, but also by the fact that he began to feel sympathy for both the farm equipment and whoever was dancing with it.

The film was called "Deere John," and the man dancing with it was Jamey Hampton, who, along with his...
Quip Magazine •

Story time with The Zolas

It was the British Columbia Boys’ Choir that brought The Zolas together some 15 years ago. Since then, Zachary Gray and Tom Dobrzanski carried their vocal talents to Lotus Child until 2009, when the duo released the heavily praised Tic Toc Tic. Their latest album, Ancient Mars (2012), has an atmospheric quality with darker lyrics. “Cold Moon” and “Strange Girl” were heavily influenced by exes. Every song is marked by catchy riffs, clever lyrics, and refreshing realness. Though “Knot in My Heart”...
Quip Magazine •

Kid Koala, looking back and moving forward

You know you’ve made it when you appear on BrainyQuote.com. Eric San (stage name “Kid Koala”) has come a long way since DJing the parties of high school friends.
He’s toured with Radiohead and the Beastie Boys, wrote music for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, worked with the Gorillaz and Deltron 3030 (“The hip-hop supergroup,” in the words of David Letterman when they appeared on his show Oct 15). Almost single-handedly, he’s lifted scratching into a new stratosphere, creating the genre “turntable b...
Quip Magazine •

Reading into Junip: interview with Jose Gonzalez

Argentine-born Jose Gonzalez’s trademark voice remains kind in the most stressful of situations. Quip spoke to Gonzalez while a soccer riot was going on in his hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, as he was fleeing a helicopter before the interview began: “I’m sorry, let me get to a quieter place, just one moment please.”
What Rolling Stone calls a “pastoral kindness” echoes through Junip, the band Gonzalez got his start with, and is returning to with renewed energy. Junip consists of Gonzalez, Elias...
HuffPost •

Drink Sustainably: Heineken's Fight to Remain a Global Sustainability Leader

For Heineken, sustainable practices reduce the risks that get in the way of profit. "Everything we're doing in the area of sustainable sourcing is very much driven by a company strategy to mitigate risk, and is not, unfortunately, driven by a certain business opportunity," Dickstein said.

For Heineken, sustainable practices reduce the risks that get in the way of profit. "Everything we're doing in the area of sustainable sourcing is very much driven by a company strategy to mitigate risk, and i...