He completed his Ph.D. in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2009. His research has appeared in edited collections on the work of crime novelist Donald Goines and the volume Post-Soul Satire. Leader-Picone is in the process of completing a book manuscript entitled Rearticulating Race: African American Literature in the Age of Obama. The book analyzes the meaning of race in African American literature of the twenty-first century through concepts such as post-racialism, post-blackness, and post-soul aesthetics.