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 documentaries 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; Charleston Library Society; Pasadena City College; Fisk University; and the Nickelodeon Theatre, Columbia, South Carolina. Additionally, he has screened his documentaries at Music for Galway (a music festival in Ireland); Oxford Film Festival, Oxford, Mississippi; and the North Dakota Human Rights Festival.

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 honorable mention.

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. In 2007, as part of the Longfellow bicentennial, he founded The Longfellow Chorus with a mission to perform choral settings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry. Through this innovative project, he led rare performances of Longfellow cantatas by major composers: “Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha" (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor); “Scenes from The Saga of King Olaf” (Edward Elgar); “The Golden Legend" (Arthur Sullivan); “The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral" (Franz Liszt).

In 2016, he revived the first American musical comedy, “Evangeline, or The Belle of Acadia" (1872). He premiered dozens of new works through the popular Longfellow Chorus International Composers Competition. His feature documentary, “Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912" (2012), is a groundbreaking film that reintroduces this forgotten early 20th-century Black English composer to modern audiences.