Contact

Say hi :-)

Astoria, NY

Writing Background

I’ve been writing for fun and solace since I was six. After publishing “The Book of Parrots” in the third grade and several lethally earnest poems in high school, I joined the student newspaper at The University of Alaska Anchorage and my worldview sprang open. Based on some 200 articles that forced me to leave my shy cocoon, I found work as a journalist after studying English literature and psychology. My first professional article was with Alaska’s go-to alternative weekly, The Anchorage Press, where I profiled the “Craigslist artist” John Hirst in 2012. For the next three years, I regularly covered Anchorage’s art scene — opera, theater, visual art, horticulture, performance art, ballet, profiles on funding structures, and interviews with musicians, painters, comedians, mask carvers, blues artists, classical conductors, and entrepreneurs.

More recently, I have written personal essays on Ray Bradbury influencing my reading habits, the connection between literature and sex work, and reclaiming one’s full ethnic identity. I have also profiled and reviewed QTPOC authors including Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Edgar Gomez, and Dennis E. Staples. An MLA nerd at heart, I have also pursued critical and academic essays on Latine literature, queer erasure in the arts, and queer relationships – like Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg – that have been sidelined by heteronormative archives.

As an arts journalist, I love to explore life’s little marvels — a pioneering app for art galleries, “moose kill signs” in Alaska, a wild speakeasy in Bushwick, or a ship museum in Red Hook. I also like to write about the intersection of business and art, which I have done for The Anchorage Press, The Red Hook Star-Revue, HuffPost, among others. I pride myself on covering local artists and businesses before they are picked up by major outlets; this includes profiles on Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson), Morgan O’Hara, and a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” staged on a barge. Some of my favorite assignments have been going on a boat with the media artist Katherine Behar, interviewing musicians like José Gonzalez and The Crystal Fighters, and learning about carving masks with the Yup’ik and Inupiaq sculptor Drew Michael.

If you’re curious to know more about me and my approach to storytelling, check out episode four of the Netflix docuseries Worn Stories, where I talk about a magical jockstrap, or my essay for Chicken Soup for the Soul, which is the first coming-out story published in the series!

See you around,

<3

Matthew

One Headlight: A Memoir

My first book One Headlight follows a boy, his mother, and his larger-than-life abuela making the most of life in Southcentral Alaska while driving a beat-down Mustang with one working headlight.

The Anchorage-based publisher Cirque gave it a home in 2021, and I spoke with the marvelous Joe Okonkwo at Astoria Bookshop about writing memoir and creative writing expand our worlds.

You can buy a physical or ebook of One Headlight pretty much anywhere.

Contact me if you want a donated copy to be sent to your local library!

Excerpt from One Headlight on figure skating & writing

Interviews & Profiles

The Riverdale Press by Ethan Stark-Miller
NPR's Hometown Alaska by Kathleen McCoy
Pine Hills Review by Alex J. Tunney
A&U Magazine by Ruby Corner
University of Alaska by Matt Jardin

Reviews

“[An] inspirational story of resilience and fortitude” —Chelsea News New York

"An affecting and surprising remembrance about the responsibilities of parents and children." —Kirkus

"Like no other book I have read. It will entertain you as it crushes you." —Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season & the Lambda-nominated anthology Building Fires in the Snow

"Depictions of working-class, poverty-level Alaska [that] counterbalance the usual tropes of Alaska as a sublime wilderness.” —Anchorage Daily News

"Quirky humor, bright language, and sharp emotional insight." —Joe Okonkwo, author of Jazz Moon, winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

"[A heartfelt coming-of-age memoir] .... One Headlight well illuminates the necessary pain of separating from our mothers to become who we are—and the way we continually return to them, and to who we were, to understand who that is." — Red Hook Star-Revue

"More than another coming-of-age story. It is a love letter to his mother, Abby, a lively woman, who navigates the world with humor and humility, doing her best with the hand she was dealt, both for herself and for the son she so clearly adores." — Lucian Childs, author of Dreaming Home

"A beautiful, moving queer coming-of-age memoir set in Alaska with a narrative voice that is funny, sensitive and emotionally sharp. For fans of Garrard Conley, Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor." — Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of Mirror Made of Rain.

Newsletter:

We Love Syn

Keep in touch!

I send a quarterly email with updates about my life and some beautiful sentences I recently encountered.

It’s called We Love Syn.

Biography

Matthew Frye-Castillo was born in San Diego, raised outside of L.A., and came of age in Southcentral Alaska. He often writes about historical erasure and reclamation, Mixed, Queer, and Latine identities, and the psychosocial power of art.

As a proud MBA dropout, Matthew follows Robert Shiller in rethinking the role of finance in creating social goods. As an editorial consultant, he works with Native-owned corporations on executive communications, content strategy, B2B marketing, and human resources training. He also directs the Program for Professional Communications at Lehman College, a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution.

Matthew is a cultural organizer and founded a speaker series at Shakespeare & Co. as a student at Hunter College, as well as the LGBTQ+ Literary Series at Lehman College. He currently directs the LGBTQ+ Collective at Lehman College, a cultural and programming hub for queer life at the university.

Matthew is a tenured CCE Lecturer of Professional Writing at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has introduced courses on Writing and Entrepreneurship and LGBTQ+ theory and literature. He has also taught modern and American literature, genre studies, rhetoric, research strategies, editing for style and flow, business writing, and writing for emerging media with a focus on AI ethics and composition.

He is the author of One Headlight: A Memoir (Cirque Press, 2021). He was a longtime arts writer for The Anchorage Press and the arts editor of The Red Hook Star-Revue. His personal essays, criticism, poetry, and fiction have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Anchorage Daily News, Best Gay Stories, and Worn in New York, which was featured in the Netflix adaptation, Worn Stories. His creative work has been supported by the Hertog Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Matthew holds an MFA from Hunter College and studied at Columbia University, Clark University, and The University of Alaska Anchorage. Find him across social media @matthewsyntax907.