Question Cards at the 2016 InterFaith Works Duck Race to End Racism.

Stories make us human. Syracuse Stories grounds its mission in that straightforward claim. Its purpose is to encourage and celebrate community-wide cultural practices that reveal just how powerful story-making and telling are. Syracuse Stories affirms the story-telling/narrative dimension of all the arts. Reminds us that story-telling is an aspect of all cultural traditions and is itself an art form. Asserts that stories and the arts are meaning-making processes that tell us, and at times reveal unbidden, who we are as individuals, communities, cultures and collectively who we are as a species. Accepts as a given that stories are the way people locate themselves and their communities in time and space by linking people and cultural communities to specific places and events. And that the repetition of stories creates a continuum of meaning that binds people to their cultures across generations. In short, stories tell us who we are and where we have come from and set the expectations regarding where we are going or can go.

Syracuse Stories is inspired by FLIP (Festa LiterĂ¡ria Internacional de Paraty) It is the annual literary and cultural festival and had its first edition in 2003.