A neighbor’s record.
I am one person. I am not a lawyer, not an academic, not a member of any organization, and not a political candidate. What follows is why I built this.
My name is Stacey Kilgore. I live in Knox County, Tennessee. I do not currently have any children enrolled in Knox County Schools. I have no political role, no organizational affiliation behind this work, and no candidate to endorse. I built this catalog on my own, using publicly available source text and publicly available statutory criteria, and I am publishing it under my own name because I think it is the right thing to do.
I built it because of a decision made by my own school district under a law I believe is being applied dishonestly. On May 14, 2026, Knox County Schools removed Alex Haley’s Roots from every library shelf in the district. Mr. Haley spent the last years of his life on Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills, just up the road from the schools where his novel will no longer be available. There is a thirteen-foot bronze statue of him in Morningside Park. His personal papers, including drafts of Roots, are housed at the University of Tennessee. According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, the district committee that elevated his Pulitzer Prize–winning saga of an American family for review did so on the basis of a single passage in chapter 84. One passage. One Pulitzer. Removed.
The standard that did it is Tennessee Code Annotated § 49-6-3803, as amended in 2024. The original 2022 version of the Age-Appropriate Materials Act contained a safety valve that allowed librarians and teachers to weigh a book’s literary, historical, or educational value before removing it from a school library. The 2024 amendment stripped that safety valve out. What remains is a statute that targets any material containing prohibited content — nudity, sexual conduct, sexual abuse, or excessive violence — “in whole or in part.” Five words doing an enormous amount of work. A single passage, anywhere in the book, is now sufficient.
Why I tested the Bible.
I grew up loving to read. I grew up on The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia — Tolkien’s siege of Minas Tirith with its severed heads catapulted over the wall, Lewis’s Aslan slaughtered on a stone table while children watched. I read the Iliad in high school. I read Beowulf. I knew, the moment I sat down with the amended text of Tennessee’s law, that the books I had loved as a child would never have made it onto a school library shelf under this statute.
I could have tested it with any of those books. But at the end of the day, who would care? I am a far thing from a good Christian; it might even be safe to call me agnostic. But I read a lot of the Bible growing up, and I knew there were parts that would not cut it. I had no idea how much. I chose the King James Bible as the test text for one specific reason: it is the text most universally understood in this state to be valuable, important, and worthy of protection. If the law’s standards, applied without favor or exception, would also flag the King James Bible — not for removal as a matter of my opinion, but as a matter of the statute’s own operative language — then the standard is not neutral. It is selective. And the selectivity is the law’s mechanism for choosing which voices and which traditions get to remain accessible to young Tennesseans, and which do not.
So I built the catalog. I read the statute carefully. I parsed all 31,102 verses of the public-domain KJV text from Project Gutenberg. I scanned them against the four statutory categories — nudity, sexual content, sexual abuse, and excessive violence — using the operational definitions documented on the Methodology page. I cross-checked the results against curated reference lists. I excluded false positives. The result is 147 catalogued passages spanning 754 verses across 31 books of scripture.
This catalog is not a request to remove the Bible from anywhere. It is not a critique of any believer’s faith. It is not a partisan instrument. I have no quarrel with anyone who finds the Bible meaningful, valuable, or sacred — including, often, in some of the same passages this catalog flags, which contain extraordinary moral and literary weight precisely because they tell hard truths about hard things. I love many hard books. Roots is one of them. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of them. The book of Judges is one of them. None of them should be banned from any library serving young readers. That is, in the end, the actual point of this project.
I built this catalog because I believe the surest way to expose what a bad law actually does is to apply it honestly. Applied honestly, the Age-Appropriate Materials Act removes books that should not be removed. The catalog you can read on this site is the proof.
About me, briefly.
I am a Knox County resident with a professional background in technology and operations, including prior work on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at SAIC. I am writing on my own time, on my own dime, and without coordination with any campaign, candidate, party, organization, advocacy group, or employer. The work is mine; the views are mine; the responsibility for any errors is mine. If you find an error in the catalog, please write to me at the contact address on the press page and I will correct it openly and on the record.
I am happy to speak with journalists, researchers, school librarians, teachers, parents, board members, attorneys, and clergy. I am not interested in arguments designed to distract from the catalog’s substance. The substance is the catalog. Anything else is conversation about the catalog.
What I hope happens next.
I hope that the record I have assembled becomes useful. To journalists writing the next round of stories about book removals in Tennessee. To school librarians and English teachers who are trying to defend their collections under enormous pressure. To attorneys considering whether the inconsistent application of the AAMA gives rise to a constitutional challenge. To legislators of any party who recognize that a law cannot mean one thing for one beloved book and another thing for another. To the residents of my own county, who deserve to know whether the rules being applied to Roots are being applied to every book or only to some books.
And I hope — I admit, hope is the right word — that Roots and Slaughterhouse-Five are returned to the shelves of Knox County Schools, that Maus is returned to the shelves of McMinn County Schools, and that the many other books removed under the AAMA from school libraries across Tennessee are restored. Not because the case is rhetorical, but because the case is right.
I don’t want to ban the Bible. I don’t want to ban The Lord of the Rings. I don’t want to ban Roots. What I would like to ban is stupid and lazy laws.
Our librarians and teachers, many of them lifelong Tennesseans, many of them people of faith, served our children’s reading lives well before this law existed. They would serve them well again. Give them their judgment back. Give our children their books back.