"It's important to tell someone what they mean to you when you can, because you never know when you can't".
This is a paraphrased sentence from a conversation I had with Maria Martella from Tinlinds on Wednesday, April 30, 2025 during the Spring GTA Resource Fair.
The GTA Resource Fair was a wonderful event, as usual. I took 17 students and a very supportive parent volunteer to the Queen Elizabeth Building on the CNE grounds to purchase books. Just like the fall of 2024 and the spring of 2024, our students took their responsibilities seriously and stayed within their budget.
Maria was one of the vendors at the GTA Resource Fair. She is also the newest (2024) recipient of the prestigious Claude Aubry Award presented by IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Canada.
Maria Martella is the founder and owner of Tinlids, a Canadian book wholesaler that sells to schools and public libraries across the country. She is widely recognized for her knowledge of children’s books. She frequently speaks at professional development events for teachers and librarians and gives book talks and workshops at Humber College and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). In 2020, Maria helped start the Save Our School Libraries initiative which she continues to champion.
Maria received her award virtually during IBBY Canada's recent meeting. When I received my CSL award in February at the Treasure Mountain Canada 8 dinner, not only did Maria attend the reception, but she sent me the most lovely email telling me personally what our friendship has meant to her. It left me speechless. When I chatted with Maria about her own award at the GTA Resource Fair last week, she humbly redirected the attention back to me, saying that she referenced my speech when contemplating her own. This is typical Maria - modest to a fault, with the ability to make everyone feel like they are the most important person in the world when in conversation.
Since this is a blog post, and Maria cannot place the spotlight on others, as she usually does, this is the perfect opportunity for me to talk about what Maria Martella means to me.
Maria Martella
I like searching back to see when significant people first enter my life. For Maria, I have to go waaaaaay back. I have photographic evidence of visiting Tinlids at the GTA Resource Fair in 2004, a year after Maria founded it, and I took my school's junior division students to the Children's Book Store in 1998, when she was employed as the manager there. I've listened to her present at many OLA Super Conferences (like in 2013). She's been a guest speaker for my Teacher Librarianship AQ course (2019 and 2024).
(This is a photo of me and Maria at the Canadian Children's Book Centre Awards Gala in 2016. The woman does not age! She is beautiful inside and out!)
Maria has shaped my teacher-librarianship journey in so many ways, and especially through the GTA Graphic Novel Club. This was an initiative that Maria spearheaded around 2010, where several teacher-librarians who liked and understood graphic novels would gather at Tinlids headquarters. Maria would feed us and lend us graphic novels from Tinlids stock for us to read. We'd reassemble a few weeks later and discuss the comics we read, appreciating the form and considering how these books could be incorporated into curricular areas or which grades and ages of readers would respond best to them. It was a magical time and fed me mentally after I had just finished my Masters of Education degree. Gail de Vos at the University of Alberta may have kindled my love affair with graphic novels, but Maria Martella made sure that the flame kept burning. Her incredible generosity, with the food, books, and time, cannot be overestimated.
Maria is constantly doing things to put books into the hands of young people and advancing the cause of Canadian children's literature everywhere. I remember when she drove hours and hours up to a school on a reserve to run a book fair and donate a large amount of books to the school. There was no publicity, no advertising blitz - this was just how Maria typically gives back, without fanfare. Maria has many connections and uses those connections to protect intellectual freedom and help build the network of school libraries and school library professionals in Canada. It was Maria's efforts that led my friend Wendy Burch Jones to attend the British Columbia Teacher Librarian Association conference in 2024, and that led to conversations that led to the upcoming theme for Canadian School Library Day 2025. Without Maria saying to Wendy, "I think you should be at this conference" and bringing her along, this wouldn't have happened.
Tinlids became the official sponsor of the Forest of Reading since 2014. Maria has done an incredible amount of work promoting Canadian authors and illustrators and defending books against shadow bans and censorship. She has spent countless hours explaining and justifying and protecting the rights of books to exist in school libraries across the province and country. She is a library hero.
On top of all of this, I feel incredibly privileged to call Maria Martella my friend. Despite being insanely busy, we try to scratch out a few minutes when at a conference or during the Forest of Reading Festival to chat about our recent trips or our offspring. A long, long time ago, I brought my two young children over March Break to Tinlids to buy books and introduce them to Maria. She remembers both Mary and Peter; they remember having a marvelous time searching through the shelves for books to buy and interacting with this friendly lady. My "other children", aka my students, know that if they have questions about books to buy, they can turn to Maria, who will treat them with respect and consideration, not as children but as fellow readers.
(This is the photo from March 2009 when my children visited Maria at Tinlids over March Break. They were 9 and 6 1/2 when this was taken. They are now 25 and nearly 23!)
Congratulations Maria on this well-deserved honour.
Maria's kindness, civic-mindedness, and unabashed way of giving and receiving affection returned to my mind during my meeting on Friday May 2 of the North American and European chapter of the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance. During this meeting, the first thing on the agenda was to pay tribute to Tessa Jolls, a giant in media literacy circles, who passed away on March 31, 2025. This is what I said, as the Canadian representative. (This next section below will also appear on the Association for Media Literacy's website at www.aml.ca )
Tessa Jolls
The 4th IMLRS conference was held on June 27-28, 2022 in Madison, WI, USA.
Tessa is fourth from the right and I am on the far right.
I don’t remember when I first heard of Tessa Jolls. I knew I heard of her long before I had the fortune of meeting her. Canadians in-the-know are proud of their media literacy heritage, so it takes quite a bit to impress Canucks. Tessa was impressive. She’s been in the business of making a more media literate society for a long time, and possessed a zeal for the subject that belied her age. The Center for Media Literacy and the Consortium for Media Literacy were and are incredible legacies to leave behind. Carol Arcus, the most recent IC4ML Jessie McCanse winner, said of her fellow award recipient, “Tessa was a quiet, modest cheerleader for media literacy. She helped map out the history of global media literacy for UNESCO and was a great supporter of the Association for Media Literacy. She was, for want of a better, more eloquent term, a good person.”
At the Global Media Education Summit on March 4, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Tessa is second from the left and I am second from the right.
Tessa was a globetrotter and knew how to navigate both the individual states within her home country with all their policies and legislation, as well as countries around the world. She made friends while making an impact. As Neil Andersen, president of the AML, remarked: “the media literacy community has lost a valuable warrior.”
As someone relatively new to the global media literacy network, Tessa welcomed me and made me feel like I belonged in these conversations, even though I am an elementary school teacher. She respected and appreciated expertise of all types. It is unfortunate that I did not have more time to interact with and get to know Tessa the person as well as Tessa the legend, but both will continue to reside in the hearts and minds of media literacy advocates everywhere.
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