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Hi there!

I'm a journalist & editorial consultant based in Astoria, NY, who was born in San Diego 🌴 & grew up in Alaska 🐻‍❄️

PSA: published under "Matt Caprioli" until 2022

Work with me if you're…

An editor looking for a reliable reporter. Community reporting is where I started, and it's still the work I love most. I spent three years (2012–2015) covering arts and culture for The Anchorage Press, Alaska's largest alt-weekly. In 2017 I joined The Red Hook Star-Revue as a reporter. As arts editor, I doubled the section's coverage and staff and set up an internship program with CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. My bylines include The Paris Review Daily, Lambda Literary, HuffPost, The Anchorage Daily News and The Gay & Lesbian Review. I'm currently a pro bono editorial consultant for The Anchorage Press as it relaunches. I take assignments for reported features, profiles, criticism and essays. I'm especially interested in cultural responses to AI, applied scientific research, higher education, emerging and established artists, and wealth, power and social enterprise.

An author with a memoir or nonfiction book in the works. I've been the developmental editor on two memoirs and co-wrote a third, which the author self-published. I hold an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College. I also know what happens after the manuscript is done. Working at The Paris Review, studying in Columbia's publishing program and freelancing for Shakespeare & Co. taught me how books get made, marketed and sold, especially by independent authors. I also have a background in marketing, and I look for the right approach for each new client. I see marketing as an extension of the book, and I enjoy helping authors find distinctive, memorable ways to share its impact.

A company bringing AI into how its people write. I have presented on AI-mediated writing at academic conferences and teach it to undergraduates at Lehman College (CUNY), where I direct the Program for Professional Communications. I bring the rigor of reviewing academic scholarship to the workplace as a writing and communications consultant for several Native-owned companies. If your team is adopting AI tools and wants its writing to stay clear, accurate and human – and to know why em-dashes are the key to AI understanding – let's talk.

— Matthew Frye-Castillo

Matthew Frye-Castillo is a New York–based journalist and editorial consultant.

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"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 •

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...