Charles Kaufmann

Charles Kaufmann is an award-winning writer, historian, filmmaker, composer and the founding director of The Longfellow Chorus, a professional non-profit performing arts organization in Portland, Maine.

He has given lecture-screenings of his feature-length documentary "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912,” at Oberlin Conservatory; Boston University African-American Studies; Yale-Norfolk Festival; SUNY Buffalo; Georgetown University; Colour of Music Black Classical Musicians Festival, Charlestown, South Carolina; and Pasadena City College. His short documentary, “That's None of My Business,” about the attempt on November 1, 1963, by two youthful civil rights activists to desegregate a concert by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Jackson, Mississippi, was premiered in January 2022 in-theatre at Music for Galway (a music festival in Ireland), and screened in March 2022 at the Oxford Film Festival, Oxford, Mississippi, and in November 2022 at the North Dakota Human Rights Film Festival, Fargo, North Dakota.  Twice a finalist at the prestigious Ithaca Choral Composition Contest, his choral setting of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Snow-Flakes,” won the second prize in 2007.

He is currently working on a feature documentary about the life and work of a young artist from Pittsburgh, Frederick Demmler, who was killed in Belgium near the end of the First World War, “This Collapse of All Things: The Short Life of Frederick A. Demmler, Artist.”

In May 2023, he will present his paper, “The Super-Honeymoon of Fred Demmler and Alexander James,” as part of the panel of the Henry James Society at the 34th Annual Conference of The American Literature Association in Boston.

His short piece of creative nonfiction, "An Elegy for Your Cat,” nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize, appears in The Citron Review and in the anthology Citron 10: Celebrating 10 Years of the Short Form. Other short stories can be found on East of the Web and in "Bound Off Short Story Podcast: Issue 4." He was a fiction finalist in the 2009 Aesthetica Creative Works Competition with his short piece of fiction, “She,” which was published in print in Aesthetica Creative Works Annual.

His feature drama screenplay “A Possession for All Time” (2022) has been recognized multiple times at international screenplay competitions, twice as award winner, twice as finalist, once as semi-finalist, four times as quarter-finalist, and four times as honorable mention.